Chapter Z.
HEGEL. THE POETICS OF HISTORY
AND THE WAY BEYOND IRONY
**% Introduction
Hegel's thought about history began in Irony. He presupposed history as a
prime fact of both consciousness (as paradox) and human existence (as contradiction ) and then proceeded to a consideration of what the Metonymical
and Synecdochic modes of comprehension could make of a world so apprehended. In the process he relegated Metonymical comprehension to the
status of a base for physical scientific explanations of the world, and further
limited it to the explanation of those occurrences that can legitimately be
describe^ in terms of cause-effect (mechanical} relationships. He conceived
Synecdochic consciousness to have a more general applicability— that is, to
the data of both nature and history—inasmuch as both the physical and the
human world can be legitimately comprehended in terms of hierarchies of
species, genera, and classes, the relationships among which suggested to
Hegel the possibility of a synchronic representation of reality jn general,
whicluis itself hierarchical in nafrire, even though he denied that this hierarchycould be conceived to have unfolded in time in the physical world. This
position was consistent with the science of Hegel's time, which did not permit the attribution of the capacity to evolve to either physical or organic
nature; in general, it taught the fixity of species.
Hence, Hegel was forced to conclude that the formal coherence which
HEGEL
METAHISTORY
man perceives in physical objects is only that—that is, formal—and that the
appearance of an evolutionary connection betweA them that man thinks he
discerns is a function of the mind's effort to comprehend the world of purely
spatial relationships under the aspect of time. This means that, insofar as
Hegel was driven toward the doctrine of natural evolution, he was so driven
by logical considerations alone. The mind properly organizes the natural
world, conceived as a hierarchy of ever more comprehensive forms—from
individual and species to genus and class—and is driven by speculation to
imagine the possibility of the class of all classes, which would be the formal
aspect of the whole of Being. But man has no grounds for imputing to this
hierarchy of forms an evolution from lower to higher or higher to lower in
time. Each apprehended formal coherence is only a logical presupposition of
that above it, just as it is the logical consequence of that below it. But none
is the actual precedent of the other, for in nature the species themselves do
not change or evolve; only individuals do, and they change or evolve in the
movement of straight lines (as in gravitational fall) or cycles (as in organic
processes of reproduction, birth, growth, decay, and death), which is to say
that they develop within the limits of a specific form, not across species.
For Hegel, every instance of cross-species fertilization represented a
degeneration, a conuption ui apccica, rather man in improvement or higher
form of life. Nature, therefore, exists for man in the modes of Metonymy
•and Synecdoche; ?nd man's consciousness is adequate to the full comprehension of its modes of existence when he deploys causal concepts to explain
changes in nature and typological systems to characterize the formal coherence and levels of integration or dispersion which nature offers to perception
guided by reason and aesthetic sense. It is, however, quite otherwise with
history, for which causal explanations and typological characterizations of its
data represent possible modes of conceiving its more primitive levels of
occurrence, but which, if they alone are employed for its comprehension,
expose understanding to the dangers of mechanism on the one hand and
formalism on the other.
Hegel took the limitations of a purely mechanistic approach to history to
be manifest, since the very primacy which such an approach conceded to
concepts of causal explanation led inevitably to the conclusion not only that
the whole of history was totally determined but also that no change of any
genuine significance could ever occur in history, the apparent development of
human culture perceived there having to be construed as nothing but the
rearrangement of primitive elements in different combinations. Such a view
did as little justice to the obvious evolution of religious, artistic, scientific,
and philosophical consciousness as it did to the evolution of society itselfSuch an approach had to lead to the conclusion that, in fact, there had been
no qualitative progress of mankind, no essential advancement of culture and
society, from the time of savagery to Hegel's time, a conclusion that was
absurd on the face of it.
Formalism was another matter. It made sense of the historical process on
the basis of a distinction between higher and lower forms of life, in both
natural and historical existence. But, since it took the formal coherencies in
terms of which this distinction was specified to be timeless in essence, formalism possessed no principle by which to account for their evolution from
lower to higher forms of integration and no criterion by which to assess the
moral significance of the evolution that could actually be seen to have
occurred in the historical sphere. Like the mechanistic approach to history,
the formalist approach was forced to choose between the conclusion that the
formal coherencies it discerned in history appeared and disappeared at random or represented the eternal recurrence of the same set of formal coherencies throughout all time. No genuine evolutionary development could be
derived from consideration of them.
Thus, formalism and mechanism alike forced a choice between the ultimate total incoherence of all historical processes (pure contingency) and
their ultimate total coherence (pure determination).
But formalism was more dangerous than mechanism, in Hegel's view,
because the spiritual atmosphere of the age promoted allegiance to its different modes of deployment, as an apprehension of total incoherence or of total
coherence in the two dominant cultural movements of the time, Romanticism and Subjective Idealism, both of which Hege] despisedIn his introduction to Philosophy of History Hegel characterized one type
of reasoning which utilizes merely formalist procedures in the following
terms:
A . . . process of reasoning is adopted, in reference to the correct assertion that
genius, talent, moral virtues, and sentiments, and piety, may be found in every
zone, under all political constitutions and conditions; in confirmation of which
examples are forthcoming in abundance. [61;]
This is the sort of apprehension from which Herder derived his Organicist
conclusions about the nature of the historical process. But, Hegel went on
to note,
f
If in this assertion, the accompanying distinctions are intended to be repudiated
as unimportant or non-essential, reflection evidently limits itself to abstract categories; and ignores the [specific attributes] of tlie object in question, which certainly fall under no principle recognized by such categories. [65-66]
And he then pointed out,
That intellectual position which adopts such merely formal points of view, presents a vast field for ingenious questions, erudite views, and striking comparisons.
HEGEL
MET.VHISTORY
But, he maintained, such "reflections" are "brilliant" only
in proportion as the subject they refer, to is indefinite, and are susceptible of new
and varied forms in inverse proportion to the importance of the results that can
be gained from them, and the certainty and rationality of their issues. [Ibid.]
On such grounds, Hegel insisted, there can be no certainty regarding the
question of whether or not humanity has progressed over the course of time
and in the movement from one form of civilization to another. Moreover,
such formalism remains prey to the moral relativism of which it is the
epistemological counterpart.
It is similar with respect to that other kind of formalism, fostered by
Romanticism, which takes the individual in its concreteness and uniqueness
as a formal coherence, as against the species, genus, and class to which the
individual belongs. Hegel pointed to the inherently amoral—or immoralimplications of this point of view also. This "is something merely formal,
inasmuch as it aims at nothing more than the analysis of the subject, whatever it may be, into its constituent parts, and the comprehension of these in
their logical definitions and forms" (68). Thus, he said, in those (Romantic)
philosophers who claim to find "genius, poetry, and even philosophy" every- where in equal abundance (or equal scarcity), there is a failure to distinguish between form and content and to identify the latter as a unique
particularity along with the identification of the form as a precious evidence
of the spirit's equal dispersion throughout the world (67). It is true, Hegel
said, that we find "among all world historical peoples, poetry, plastic art,
science, even philosophy"; but, he insisted,
not only is there a diversity in style and bearing generally, but still more remarkably in subject-matter; and this is a diversity of the most important kind, affecting
the rationality of that subject-matter. [69]
It is therefore "useless" for a "pretentious aesthetic criticism to demand
that our good pleasure should not be made the rule for the matter—the
substantial parts of their contents—and to maintain that it is the beautiful
form as such, the grandeur of the fancy, and so forth, which fine art aims at,
and which must be considered and enjoyed by a liberal taste and cultivated
mind" (ibid.). The healthy intellect cannot, Hegel maintained, "tolerate
such abstractions," because "'there is not only a classical form, but a classical
order of subject-matter; and in the work of art, form and subject matter are
so closely united that the former can only be classical to the extent to which
the latter is so" (70).
All of this adds up to a condemnation of what is now called the "comparative method" of historical analysis, which is the form that Metaphorical
nsciousness takes when it is projected theoretically into a method. Hegel's
h'ections to the Metaphorical mode of representing history were even more
rulent than his objections to the Metonymical mode, for the effects of the
formalist explanations it provides and the Epic plot structures it uses to
characterize the stories it tells are morally more dangerous. Mechanistic
theories of explanation, and the Absurdist emplotments of history which
they encourage, at least do not seek to clothe the meaninglessness of the
orocesses they explicate behind distracting chatter about the "beauty" of it
all They may even serve as the basis for a particular kind of Tragic apprehension of the world—the kind of tragedy produced by the Greeks, in which
destiny is apprehended as "blind fate"—which in turn can serve as the basis
for a Stoic resolve. Yet, in the end, mechanism and the kind of Absurdist
Tragedy conceived on its basis as a principle of artistic representation can,
as they did in ancient Greece, promote an Epicurean, as well as a Stoic,
moral response. Unless there is some principle by virtue of which the whole
spectacle of human chance and determinancy, freedom and restraint, can be
transformed into a drama, with a specifically rational, and at the same time
moral, significance, the Ironic consciousness in which the thought of Hegel's
own age began its reflection is bound to end ir~ despair—01 ixi ilie kind of
egoistic self-indulgence which would bring about the end of civihzation
itself.
•*§ Language, Art, and Historical Consciousness
It is frequently not noted that Hegel dealt with historical writing and the
whole problem of historiography (as against philosophy of history) more
fully in his Encyclopedia and his Lectures on Aesthetics than in his Lectures
on the Philosophy of History. The "science" of history which it was his purpose to establish in Philosophy of History was, in his conceptualization of it,
the product of a posfhistorical consciousness, of philosophical reflection on
the works actually produced by "Reflective" historians. In. Aesthetics, however, Hegel elaborated his theory of historical writing itself, which he saw
as one of the verbal arts and hence conceived to fall tinder the imperatives of
the aesthetic consciousness. It is profitable, therefore, to consider what
Hegel had to say about historical writing and historical consciousness in this
context, as a way of rendering clear the specific content of his "theory of the
historical work."
In Part III of his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel dealt with the verbal
arts. He began with a characterization of poetic expression in general and
then proceeded to draw a distinction between poetry and prose. Poetry,, he
said,
86
METAHISTORY
is of greater antiquity than speech modelled in the artistic form of elaborate prose.
It is the original imaginative grasp of truth, a formtof knowledge which [1] fails
as yet to separate the universal from its living existence in the particular object,
which [2] does not as yet contrast law~and phenomena, end and means, or [3] relate the one to the other in subordination to the process of human reason, but
[4] comprehends the one exclusively in the other and by virtue of the other. [IV,
22 (German ed., 240); italics added]
This characterization of poetry as a form of knowledge is precisely the same
as Vico's, which is to say that it conceives poetry as a Metaphorical apprehension of the world, containing within itself the potential of generating the
other modes of txopological reduction and inflation, Metonymy, Synecdoche,
and Irony respectively. Later on Hegel said, "The character of this mode of
apprehending, reclothing, and expressing fact is throughout purely theoretical [rein theoretisch]. It is not the fact itself and its contemplative existence, but construction [Bilden] and speech [Rcden] which are the object of
poetry" (ibid. [241]). In poetry, he continued, what is expressed is simply
made use of to attain the ideal of verbal "self-expression." And he took as an
example of the poetization of a fact the distich recorded by Herodotus in
which the Greet? commemorated the slain in the Battle of Thermopylae, a
historical event. The inscription reads:
Four thousand here from Pelops' land
Against three million once did stand.
[Herodotus, The Histories, bk. VII, chap. 228, p. 494]
Hegel pointed out that the content of this distich is simply the fact that
4,000 Peloponnesians fought against three million at a certain time and
place. The main interest of the distich, however, is the "composition" of an
inscription which "communicates to contemporary life and posterity the
historical fact, and is there exclusively to do so" (Aesthetics, 23 [241]). The
mode of expression is "poetical," Hegel said, because the inscription
"testifies to itself as a deed [a poiein, vouiv]" which conveys the content in
its simplicity and at the same time expresses that content "with a definite
purpose." The language in which the idea is embodied, he went on to say, is
"of such increased value" that "an attempt is made to distinguish it from
ordinary speech," and therefore "we have a distich in place of a sentence."
(Ibid.) The content of the sentence, then, was rendered more vivid, more
immediately self-projective, than it would have been had it been expressed
as a simple prose report of an event which occurred at a given time and
place. A "prosaic" statement of the same fact would leave the content
unaltered, but would not figure itself forth as that intimate union of content
with form which is recognized as a specifically poetic utterance.
Prosaic speech, Hegel argued, presupposes a "prosaic" mode of life, which
it must be assumed developed after that stage of human consciousness in
HEGEL-
which speech was "poetical without [conscious] intention" (ibid.), prosaic
language presupposes the evolution of a post-Metaphorical consciousness, one
which "deals with finite conditions and the objective world generally, that is,
the limited categories of science or the understanding" {24 [242]). The
world in which prosaic utterance developed must be supposed to have been
one in which experience had become atomized and denuded of its ideality
and immediately apprehended significance, and voided of its richness and
vitality. Against this threat of atomicity and causal determination, consciousness erected a third way of apprehending the world, "speculative thought/'
which "does not rest satisfied with the differentiations and external relations
proper to the conceptions and deductions of the understanding," but "unites
them in a free totality" (25 [243]). Thus, Synecdoche projects-—over
against, and as an antithesis to, the world apprehended in Metonymical
terms—a "new world." But, because this new world exists only in consciousness and not in actuality (or at least is not felt to exist there), the problem
of consciousness is to relate this new world to that of concrete things. It is
the poet's task, Hegel concluded, to reconcile the world existing in thought
with that of concrete things by figuring the universal in terms of the particular, and the abstract in terms of the concrete.
Poetic expicssiun uius seeks io lestore to a prosaic world the consciousness
of its inherent ideality. In earlier times, when the distinction between poetry
and prose was not so well developed as it has since become with the advance
of science and philosophy, the poet aad an easier task—that is, simply to
deepen all that is "significant and transparent in the forms of ordinary consciousness." After the advent of higher civilization, however, in which "the
prose of life has already appropriated within its mode of vision the entire
content of conscious life, setting its seal on all and every part of it, the art of
poetry is forced to undertake the task of melting all down again and
re-coining the same anew." (26 [244]) This means that it must not only
wrest itself from the adherence of ordinary consciousness to all that is indifferent
and contingent, and . . . raise the scientific apprehension of the cosmos of fact to
the level of reason's profounder penetration, or . . . translate speculative thought
into terms of the imagination, give a body to the same in the sphere of intelligence
itself; it7 has further to convert in many ways the mode of expression common to
the ordinary consciousness into that appropriate to poetry; and, despite all deliberate intention enforced by such a contrast and such a process, to make it appear
as though all such purpose was absent, preserving the original freedom essential
to all art. [Ibid. (244-45)]
And, having designated the content and form of poetic consciousness, Hegel
then proceeded to "historicize" poetic consciousness itself, setting its various
periods of brilliance and decline within the general framework of the history
of consciousness explicated in the Phenomenology of Mind, the Philosophy
of Right, and the Philosophy of History.
METAHI STORY
Poetry is born, then, of the separation of consciousness from its object and
the need (and attempt) to effect a union witri,it once more. This essential
distinction generates the two principal classes of poetry: Classical and
Romantic, which emphasize the universal and the particular, objective and
subjective expression, respectively. And, in turn, the tension between these
two classes of poetry generates the three basic species of poetic composition:
Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic, the first two representing externality and internality as effectively stable perspectives on the world, the last representing
the effort of poetic imagination to envisage the movement by which this
tension is resolved and the unity of the subject with the object is achieved.
The Epic, Hegel said, "gives us a more extensive picture of the external
world; it even lingers by the way in episodical events and deeds, whereby the
unity of the whole, owing to this increased isolation of the parts, appears to
suffer diminution." The Lyric "changes conformably to the fluctuation of its
types, adapts itself to a mode of presentment of the great variety: at one
time it is bare narration, at another exclusive expression of emotion or contemplation; at another it restricts its vision," and so on. By contrast to both
Epic and Lyric, the Drama "requires a more strenuous conjunction" of
external and internal reality, even though it may, in a specific incarnation,
adopt either the Classic or the Romantic point of view as its constitutive
principle. (37 [256-57])
Thus, Hegel's discussion of poetry began with a discussion of speech as
the instrument of man's mediation between his consciousness and the world
he inhabits; proceeded to a distinction among the different modes in which
the world can be apprehended, thence to a distinction between poetry and
prose, between Classical and Romantic forms of both, and between Epic and
Lyric forms of these; and ended in a discussion of Drama as the art form in
which is imaged the modality of the movement by which this severed condition is healed. It is significant that, having done this, Hegel immediately
launched into a discussion of history as the prose form closest in its immediacy to poetry in general and to the Drama in particular. In fact, Hegel not
only historicized poetry and the Drama, he poeticized and dramatized history
itself.
^
History, Poetry, and Rhetoric
Hegel's formal discussion of history-writing as an art form is placed between
his discussions of poetry and oratory. Its location between these two formsone concerned with the expression of ideality in the real, the other concerned
with the pragmatic uses of linguistic tools—suggests its resemblance to the
Drama, which (as noted above) is the form of mediation taken in art
between the Epic and Lyric sensibilities. History is the prose representation
HEGEL
c a dialectical interchange between externality and intemality, as that
• terchange is lived, in precisely the same way that Drama is the poetic
resentation Q£ t n a t interchange as it is imagined. And, in fact, Hegel left
erv little doubt that, in his mind, the formal aspects of both historical and
dramatic representation are the same.
"As regards history," he said, "there can be no doubt that we find ample
opportunity here for one aspect of genuine artistic activity," for
The evolution of Human life in religion and civil society, the events and destinies
of the most famous individuals and peoples who have given emphasis to life in
either field [that is, in religion or civil life] by their activity, all this presupposes
great ends in the compilation of such a work or the complete failure of what it
implies. The historical representation of subjects and contents such as these admits
of real distinction, thoroughness, and interest; and however much our historian
must endeavor to reproduce actual historical fact, it is nonetheless incumbent
upon him to bring before our imaginative vision this motley content of events and
characters, to create anew and make vivid the same to our intelligence with his
own genius. [38 (257)]
This means, above all, that the historian cannot "rest satisfied with the bare
letter of particular fact," but must rather strive to "bring this material into
a coordinated whole; he must conceive and embrace single traits, occurrences and actions under the unifying concept" (ibid.). The wedding of such
contents with the form of representation under which they are appropriately
gathered will permit the historian to construct a narrative, the action of
which is carried forward by tension between two concrete manifestations of
a specifically human life. These manifestations are both particular and
general.
Great historical narrative—of the sort produced by Herodotus, Thucydides,
Xenophon, Tacitus, "and a few others"—images "a clear picture of nationality, epoch of time, external condition, and the spiritual greatness or weakness of the individuals concerned in the very life and characterization which
belonged to them"; at the same time, it asserts from such concrete entities
the "bond of association" in which the "various parts of [the] picture" are
transformed into a comprehensible totality of "ideal historical significance"
(ibid, [258]). This implies that historical analysis proceeds both Metonymically and Synecdochically, simultaneously breaking down the subject into
concrete manifestations of the causal forces of which they must be presumed
to be effects and seeking the coherencies which bind these entities together
into a hierarchy of progressively spiritualized unities. Yet the historian
cannot proceed with either, the "freedom" that the pure poet may claim or
with the purposefulness of the orator. The former is free to invent "facts"
as he sees fit, the latter to use his facts selectively for the specific purposes
of the oration he is composing. History stands somewhere between poetry
and oratory because, although its form is poetic, its content is prosaic. Hegel
9°
METAHISTORY
put it thus: "It is not exclusively the manner in which history is written, but
the nature of its content, which makes it prose" (39 [258]).
History deals with the "prose of life," tile materials of a specifically
"common life" (Gemeinwesen), whether considered from the side of shared
religious beliefs or from the side of polity, with its laws, institutions, and
instruments for enforcing the adherence of the subject to the values of the
commonwealth (ibid.). Out of such a common life. Hegel said, are generated those forces which lead to "either the preservation or change" of the
same, and for which we must assume the existence of individuals fitted for
both tasks. In short, the historical process is pre-eminently a product of a
conflict within the context of a shared life style and across a whole set of
such shared life styles, the conflict of achieved form with a force which seeks
to transform it or of an established power with some individual who opposes
it in the interest of its own sensed autonomy and freedom. Here, in short, is
the classical situation of the classical tragedy and the classical comedy.
The social life of man is not merely an Epic life which, for all the movement, color, and violence of action, remains substantially what it was all
along. Great individuals come to the fore, against the background of a common life shared by ordinary men, and transform this Epic situation into a
Tragic conflict in which neither ni^re besuiy cor mere strer.gth ::riumj;::s,
but in which two contending rights, two equally justifiable moral principles,
become locked in combat in order to determine what the form of human life
ir- s specific social incarnation may be. For this reason Hegel envisioned
three basic categories of actors in the historical drama: great, small, and
depraved (heroes, ordinary men, and criminals).
These individuals are great and eminent insofar as they show themselves, through
their effective personality, [to be] in cooperation with the common end which
underlies the ideal notion of the conditions which confront them; they are little
when they fail to rise in stature to the demand made on their energy; they are
depraved when, instead of racing as combatants of the practical needs of the
times, they are content merely to give free rein to an individual force which is,
with its implied caprice, foreign to all such common ends. [40 (259)]
In this catalog of types of "historical" personalities is a recapitulation of
the categories of analysis of poetry itself, but under the mode of Metonymy
—that is, causal efficacy. But, as Hegel indicated in the Philosophy of Right,
the historical field is not to be conceived as merely a field of brute force. For,
where such force predominates, where it is not in conflict with a more
general principle—that is, the "common life" of the group—there is no genuinely historical conflict and consequently no specifically "historical event."
Hegel made this quite clear in a passage follow-ing that quoted above. Where
any of the three conditions listed obtains as the general condition, where we
have the tyranny of one man, the tyranny of custom (which is the tyranny of
the ordinary man), or the tyranny of chaos, "we do not have either a genuine
HEGEL
91
[historical] content or a condition of the world such as we established in the
first part of our inquiry as essential to the art of poetry," which is the condition of all specifically human creativity (ibid.), because:
Fven in the case of personal greatness the substantive aim of its devotion is to a
laree or less extent something given, presupposed, and enforced upon it, and to
that extent the unity of individuality is excluded, wherein the universal, that is the
entire personality should be self-identical, an end exclusively for itself, an indeoendent whole in short. For however much these individuals discover their aims
in their own resources, it is for all that not the freedom or lack of it in their souls
and intelligence, but the accomplished end, and its result as operative upon the
actual world already there, and essentially independent of such individuality which
constitutes the object [of study] of history. [Ibid.]
Moreover, Hegel added, in history we find a much greater variety, more
contingencies, more subjectivity displayed in the expression of passions,
opinions, and fortunes, "which in this prosaic mode of life present far more
eccentricity and variation than do the wonders of poetry, which through all
diversity must remain constant to what is valid in all times and places"
{ibid. [259-60]).
Finally, history has to do with the carrying out of projects and aims by
specific individuals and groups, which requires the dreary work of finding
BRSU39 adequate to the task, itself a prosaic, because utilitarian, activity; snd
evidences of this activity must be depicted in the historian's account. This
attention to the details of practical activity, which must be derived from
study of the historical record and not merely presupposed by the historian, in
either a poetic or a speculative mood, makes his work so much more prosaic
than either that of the poet or that of the philosopher.
It therefore follows, according to Hegel, that the historian has no right to
"expunge these prosaic characteristics of his content or to convert them into
others more poetical; his narrative must embrace what lies actually before
him and in the shape he finds it without amplification {ohne umzudeirten] or
at least poetical transformation" (41 [260]), However much his thought
may strain to grasp the ideal significance of the form of the myriad events
he perceives, he is not permitted to make "either the conditions presented
him, the characters or events, wholly subordinate to such a purpose," even
though he may "remove from his survey what is wholly contingent and without serious significance" (ibid.). The historian "must, in short, permit them
to appear in all their objective contingency, dependence, and mysterious
caprice'' (ibid.). This means that the historian's imagination must strain in
two directions simultaneously: critically, in such a way as to permit him to
decide what can be left out of an account (though he cannot invent or add to
the facts known); and poetically, in such a way as to depict, in its vitality and
individuality, the medley of events as if they were present to the sight of the
reader. In its critical function, historical consciousness is operative only as an
HEGEL
92
METAHISTORY
excluding agency. In its synthetic function, it operates only in an inclusive
capacity. For, even if the historian may add to hisfeccounts his private reflections as a philosopher, "attempting thereby to grasp the absolute grounds for
such events, . . . he is nonetheless debarred, in reference to the actual conformation of events, from that exclusive right of poetry, namely, to accept this
substantive resolution as the fact of most importance" (42). The historian
may not fall into metahistory, even though he may speculatively apprehend
the grounds by which a metahistorical synthesizing vision might be possible,
because:
To poetry alone is the liberty permitted to dispose without restriction of the
material submitted in such a way that it becomes, even regarded on the side of
external condition, conformable with ideal truth. [Ibid.]
In this respect, oratory has a greater freedom than history, for, since the
orator's art is developed as a means to the achievement of practical ends,
just as the poet's is developed for the achievement of ideal ones, the orator
is permitted to use historical facts as he wishes, selectively and in response
to the end envisaged (43).
Thus, Hegel again invoked the distinction, made at the beginning of his
introduction to Philosophy of History, between "Original" and "Reflective"
historiography, on the basis of the essentially poetic nature of the former and
the increasingly prosaic nature of the latter, and within Reflective historiography, among the Universal, Pragmatic, and Critical types. Universal history
is, as he noted, the most poetic, taking as its subject the whole known historical world and fashioning it, in response to apprehended ideal forms, by
metaphor, into a coherent poetic whole. Pragmatic historiography, written
under the impulse to serve some cause, some practical end, rises above the
universal variety inasmuch as it moves from a poetic to an oratorical mode
of conceiving its task, from the vision of the ideality of the whole to an
awareness of the uses to which a vision of the whole can be put. The manufacture of a number of such conflicting visions of the historical process
inspires a "Critical" reflection on historical writing itself, which in turn permits the rise in consciousness of the possible ideality of the whole through
reflection in the mode of Synecdoche. This paved the way for Hegel's own
Philosophical history, which was meant to explicate the presuppositions and
forms of thought by which the essentially poetic insights of the historian can
be gathered into consciousness and transformed into a Comic vision of the
whole process. But this is the philosopher of history's task, not the historian's; like Thucydides, the historian must remain closer to the poetic mode
of apprehension, closer to Metaphorical identification with his object, but at
the same time be more self-critical, more aware of the modalities of comprehension used to transform a poetic insight into the content of a more
rational knowledge.
<^s The Possible Plot Structures
Xhis brings me to Hegel's theory of historical emplotment. When I deal
with this subject, I move from the consideration of history as an object, a
content, the form of which is to be perceived by the historian and converted
into a narrative, to that in which the form provided, the narrative actually
produced, becomes a content, an object of reflection on the basis of which a
truth about history-in-general can be asserted on rational grounds. And this
raises the problem of the possible content of that truth and the form its
affirmation must take. Hegel's solution to this problem can be formulated
in the following way. The truths figured in historical narratives of the highest sort are the truths of Tragedy, but these truths are only poetically figured
there as the forms of historical representations whose contents are the
actual life dramas lived by individuals and peoples at specific times and
places. Hence, it requires philosophical reflection to extract the truth contained in the form in which historical accounts are presented. Just as the
philosopher of art takes as his objects of study the various forms of works of
art which have appeared i- world history, so the philosopher of history takes
as his objects the various forms of the histories actually written by historians
in the course of history itself. He apprehends these histories as formal systems which may work up an account of a life in any of four modes: Epic,
Comedy, Tragedy, Satire, or in any combination of these.
But the Epic is not an appropriate form of historiography, according to
Hegel, because it does not presuppose substantial change. And the same can
be said of Satire, because, although it admits change, it perceives no substantial base against which the changes perceived can be measured. For the Epic,
all is change conceived against a basic apprehension of substantial changelessness; for Satire, all is changelessness conceived in the light of the perception
of a substantial mutability. (Cf. Hegel's remarks on Voltaire's Henriade,
131-32) So it is in the mixed genre of the (modern) Romantic Tragicomedy, which seeks to mediate between the Comic and Tragic visions of
the world, but does so only formally—that is, by representing within the
same action the representatives of each view, never combining or unifying
them, but leaving the world as sundered as it originally found it, with no
higher principle of unity being given which consciousness might turn into an
object of contemplation for the promotion of wisdom about a world thus
severed within itself. Only Comedy and Tragedy, therefore, are left as
appropriate modes of emplotment of historical processes, and the problem
is to work out their interrelations as different stages of self-conscious reflection on consciousness' relation to the world.
Hegel maintained that philosophical wisdom, when turned upon history,
bears the same relationship to historical wisdom, when turned upon the facts
of history, that the Comic vision does to the Tragic vision. That is to say,
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METAHISTORY
philosophy mediates between the concrete embodiments of human historical
existence represented in specific histories as ajaontent for which it seeks to
find an adequate form of representation and mode of emplotment. And it
finds such in the Comic vision itself. Comedy is the form which reflection
takes after it has assimilated the truths of Tragedy to itself.
<*s§ Tragedy and Comedy as Generic Plot Structures
"Dramatic action," Hegel wrote, "is not confined to the simple and undisturbed execution of a definite purpose, but depends throughout on conditions
of collision, human passion and characters, and leads therefore to actions and
reactions, which in their turn call for some further resolution of conflict and
disruption" (249)- Dramatic action, then, has precisely the same forma]
characteristics as historical action:
What we have . . . before us are definite ends individualized in living personalities
and situations pregnant with conflict; we see these as they are asserted and mainlined, as they v.-ork in cooperation or opposition—all in a EBOfficctaiy and
kaleidoscopic interchange of expression—and along with this, too, the final result
presupposed and issuing from the entirety of this interthreading and conflicting
skein of human life, iiiiw imnl. and a'nm*|ftliftifnl. which has nonetheless to
work out its tranquil resolution. [249-50 (475-76)]
Thus, Dramatic action rises above and comprehends the Epic or objective,
and the Lyric or subjective, points of view; the Drama as such adopts as its
standpoint neither one nor the other, but moves between them in such a
way as to keep both present to consciousness. It can be said, then, that the
Drama moves in the mode of Irony itself, the dialectical exchange of point
of view being nothing but this Ironic perspective. (251-52; cf. Burke, Grammar, 511-17)
According to Hegel, Drama begins in the apprehension of the one-sidedness of all perspectives on reality, and strives for the "resolution of the
one-sided aspect of these powers, which discover their self-stability in the
dramatic character" {Aesthetics, IV, 255). "And,'" Hegel added,
this is so whether, as in tragedy, they are opposed to such in hostility, or, as in
comedy, they are displayed within these characters themselves, without further
mediation, in a condition of resolution. [256]
This last passage is significant, for it suggests that Hegel regards Tragedy
and Comedy, not as opposed ways of looking at reality, but as perceptions of
situations of conflict from different sides of the action. Tragedy approaches
HEGEL
t-he culmination of an action, carried out with a specific intention, from th<
standpoint of the agent who sees deployed before him a world which is ai
once a means and an impediment to the realization of his purpose. Coined}
looks back upon the effects of that collision from beyond the condition o!
resolution through which the Tragic action has carried the spectators, even
if the action has not carried the protagonist there but has consumed him in
the process. Thus, like historical situations, Dramatic situations begin in the
apprehension! of a conflict between a world already formed and fashioned in
both its material and social aspects (the world displayed immediately in
Epic) and a consciousness differentiated from it and individuated as a self
intent upon realizing its own aims, satisfying its needs, and gratifying its
desires (the interior world expressed in Lyric). But, instead of halting at
the contemplation of this condition of severance, the Dramatic artist goes on
to contemplate the modality of the conflicts which result from this asymtotic
relationship between the individual consciousness and its object. The mode
of resolution and the depth of wisdom reflected in it will produce the actions
of three kinds of post-Epical and non-Lyrical forms of Drama: Tragedy,
Comedy, and (the counterpart of Satire) the Social Play, which is a mixed
genre that seeks to mediate between the insights of Tisge^y 3rirJ rtwse of
Comedy.
The content of Tragic action, Hegel wrote, is the same as that of history:
we apprehend it immediately in the aim?, of Tragic characters, but comprehend it fully only as "the world of those forces which carry in themselves
their own justification, and are realized substantively in the volitional activity of mankind" (295). This substantive world is that of the family, the
social, political, and religious life of civilized society, a world which at least
implicitly recognizes the legitimacy both of individual aspiration to selfhood
on the one hand and of the laws and morality of the collectivity on the other.
Family, society, religion, and politics provide the grounds of such actions as
those we call "heroic": "It is of a soundness and thoroughness consonant with
these that the really tragic characters consist. They are throughout that
which the essential notion of their character enables and compels them to be.
They are not merely a varied totality laid out in the series of views of it
propel to the epic manner." They are not unmediated individualities, but
personalities, possessing a unity of character which permits them to stand as
representatives of different aspects of "the common life" or as free agents
seeking their own self-reliance. (295-96) And in Tragic conflict, as in historically significant conflict, either the common life or the personality seeking
its own self-reliance causes the conflict itself.
Tragic Drama, however, takes not conflict itself as its object (as the Epic
tends to do), but rather that condition of resolution, in which both the hero
and the common life are transformed, which lies on the other side of this
conflict.
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96
97
METAHISTORY
In tragedy individuals are thrown into confusion in virtue of the abstract nature
of their sterling volition and character, or they afe forced to accept that with
resignation, to which they have been themselves essentially opposed. [301]
Comedy, however, attains to a vision of that reconciliation as a "victory of
the wholly personal soul-life, the laughter of which resolves everything,
through the medium and into the medium of such life" (ibid.). In short, the
general basis of Comedy is "a world in which man has made himself, in his
conscious activity, complete master of all that otherwise passes as the essential content of his knowledge and achievement; a world whose ends are consequently thrown awry on account of their own lack of substance" (ibid.).
One could hardly ask for a better characterization of the world that is
viewed, in Philosophy of History, from the standpoint of philosophical reflection on the tragedy of individual historical lives. The essence of the Comic
vision is to be found not in Satirical reflection on the contrast between what
is and what ought to be, that contrast which is the basis of moral conflict
within the heroic subject, but rather in an "infinite geniality and confidence
capable of rising superior to its own contradiction and experiencing therein
no taint of bitterness or sense of misfortune whatever" (302).
The Comic frame of mind is "a hale condition ot soul which, fully aware
of itself, can suffer the dissolution of its aims and realization" (ibid.). This
is why, Hegel suggested, the action of Comedy requires a "resolution" even
more stringently than Tragedy does (304). "In other words," Hegel said,
"in the action of comedy the contradiction between that which is essentially
true and its specific realization is more fundamentally reasserted" (ibid.).
And the reason for this, he continued, lies in the fact that, "viewed as a
genuine art," Comedy "has not the task set before it to display through its
presentation what is essentially rational as that which is intrinsically perverse and comes to naught, but on the contrary as that which neither bestows
the victory, nor ultimately allows any standing ground to folly and absurdity,
that is to say the false contradictions and oppositions which also form part
of reality" (ibid.). This is the kind of consciousness which is earned by the
agon of Aristophanes' comedy, which never caluminiates anything of genuinely ethical significance "in1 the social life of Athens," but only exposes to
ridicule the "spurious growth of the democracy, in which the ancient faith
and former morality have disappeared" (ibid.). This is also the consciousness that informs philosophy of history, in which the "mode of actual appearance adequate to what is, so to speak, substantive, has vanished out of it;
and, if what is essentially without fundamental subsistence comes to naught
with its mere pretence of being that which it is not, the individual asserts
himself as master over such a dissolution, and remains at bottom unbroken
and in good heart to the end" (305).
That this is the mode of a specifically philosophical comprehension of
history, is that to which the responsible consciousness must come under the
guidance of reason, and that it is the antithesis of Irony, are shown by
Hegel's virtual denial to the Satirical form of Dramatic representation the
status of a genuine Dramatic genre. Satirical Drama, in his view, is a result of
failure to bring the opposing sides of human existence, the subjective and
the objective, into any resolution. The best that ancient Satire, and, in
Hegel's view, modern (Romantic) Tragicomedy can provide is not "the
juxtaposition or alternation of these contradictory points of view" but a
"mutual accommodation, which blunts the force of such opposition" (306).
There is a tendency in such Drama,'as in that "valet's historiography" which
belongs to the same genre, to look for purely personal, "psychological"
analyses of character or to make the "material conditions" the deciding
factor in the action, so that nothing noble can be finally either asserted or
denied of noble men {307). And so it is with that historiography of the
modem, Romantic age. The Romantic historian seeks refuge from the reality of personality and that "fate" which is nothing but the "common life"
into which it is born by sentimental contemplation of the psychological
motives of the protagonist on the one side hand or the materiality of his
condition on the other.
-.
<&§ History in Itself and History for Itself
At the beginning of the Introduction to his Philosophy of History, Hegel
distinguished among three classes of historical consciousness (Original, Reflective, and Philosophical), to the second of which his objections to the
limitations of both mechanism and formalism equally apply- These three
classes of historical consciousness represent different stages of historical selfconsciousness. The first corresponds to what might be called mere historical
consciousness (historical consciousness in itself), the second to a historical
consciousness which recognizes itself as such (historical consciousness for
itself), and the third to a historical consciousness which not only knows
itself as such but which reflects upon both the conditions of its knowing—
that is, its relation to its object (the past)—and the general conclusions
about the nature of the whole historical process that can be derived from
rational reflection on its various products, specific historical works (historical
consciousness in and for itself).
Mere historical consciousness, the product of which is "Original"
(ursprunglich) historiography, develops out of the simple awareness of the
historical process itself, a -sense of the passage of time and an awareness of
the possibility of the development of human nature. It is found in thinkers
like Herodotus and Thucydides, "whose descriptions are for the most part
limited to deeds, events, and states of society, which they had before their
eyes, and whose spirit they shared. They simply transferred what was passing
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METAHISTORY
in the world around them, to the realm of representative intellect." According to Hegel, such historians work like poets v^io operate on material "supplied by [the] emotions, projecting it into an image for the conceptual
faculty [fiir die Vorstellung]" (Phil, of Hist., 1 [German ed., 11]). To be
sure, these historians may have used accounts of deeds written by other men,
but they made use of them in the same way that one makes use of a
"language already fashioned"—that is to say, only as an ingredient. For them,
there is no distinction between the history they live and the history they
write (ibid. [12]).
What Hegel was suggesting here is that "Original historians" work primarily in the mode of Metaphorical characterization: they "bind together the
fleeting elements of story, and lay them up as treasures in the Temple of
Mnemosyne" (ibid., 2 [12]). Their mode of explanation is poetic representation, though with this difference: the Original historian takes as his content
"the domain of reality—actually seen or capable [in principle] of being
seen," not the domain of dreams, fantasies, and illusions (ibid.). These
"poetic" historians actually "create" (schaffen) the "events, the deeds, and
the states of society" as an object (ein Werk) for the conceptual faculty
(Vorstellung) (ibid.). Hence, their narratives are both restricted in range
and limited in time. Their principal aim is to make a lifelike "image" of the
events that they know at first hand or on adequate authority. "Reflections"
are not for them, for they live "in the spirit of [their] subject" (ibid.). And,
since thc\ share the same spirit as that which informs the events they depict,
they are able, with perfect impunity to criticism, to interpolate the details of
the narrative—such as the speeches which Thucydides put in the mouths of
his protagonists—as they see fit, as long as these details cohere with the
spirit of the whole {ibid.).
Such poetic historiography is as rare among modem historians, Hegel
said, as it was among the ancients. It can be produced only by spirits who
combine a talent for practical affairs on the grand scale, participation in
events, and poetic talent, as was the case with Cardinal de Retz or Frederick
the Great. To penetrate to the essential truths of the works produced by
such "Original historians" requires long study and patient reflection, Hegel
concluded, for their works represent a form of historiography that is both a
history and an original document of the times in which they were written.
Here the identification of the soul of the historian and the events about
which he writes (and in which he has participated) is all but complete, and
if we would know any of these—the poetry, the events, or the works of the
historian—we must seek to know them all. W e can read them for poetic
inspiration or intellectual sustenance, it might be added; but to subject them
to the criteria we use for the assessment of modern "reflective" historiography, the historiography of the professional scholar, is, Hegel implied, as much
an indication of bad taste as of the misunderstanding of scientific criticism.
Certain kinds of "Original histories," such as the works of the monks of th<
Middle Ages, may be criticized for their abstractness or formalism; but thest
limitations result from the remoteness of the lives of those who wrote then
from the events about which they wrote. We have no reason to try either t(
empathize with or to criticize such works; we need only plunder them fo;
whatever factual data they contain and use them for the construction of oui
own historical accounts of the past.
The second class of historical works, "Reflective" histories—histories foi
themselves—are written not only out of an apprehension of the passage o(
time but also in the full awareness of the distance between the historian and
his object of study, which distance the historian consciously tries to close.
This effort to close the distance between present and past is conceived to
exist as a distinct problem. The spirit of reflective history therefore "transcends the [historian's own] present," Hegel wrote; and the various theoretical devices that different historians use to close the gap which separates them
from the past, to enter into that past, and to grasp its essence or content,
account for the various species of reflective history which this kind of historian produces.
Hegel distinguished four species of Reflective history: Universal, Pragmatic,
(Jritica!, and Conceptual (Begriffsgeschichte), A!! four species display the
attributes—in his characterizations of them—of either the Metonymical or the
Synecdochic mode of comprehension. Universal history deals, by the very
necessity of having to reduce its materials, with abstractions and foreshortenings; it is arbitrary and fragmentary—not only because of the scope of its
subject, but also because of the need to ascribe causes without sufficient
reasons and to construct typologies on the bases of inadequate evidence.
Pragmatic histories produce the same kind of pictures of the past, but, rather
than do so in the interest of knowing the whole past (which predominates in
Universal history), they strive to serve the present, to illuminate the present
by adducing to it analogies from the past, and to derive moral lessons for
the edification and instruction of living men. Such histories may, like their
Universalist counterparts, be great works of art or, as in the case of Montesquieu's L'Esprit des lois, be genuinely enlightening; but their authority is
limited, not only because the truths on which they base their lessons for the
present are as fragmentary and abstract as those found in Universal history,
but also because "what experience and history teach is this—that peoples
and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted on
principles deduced from it" (6). Hegel thought this because:
Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of
things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations
connected with itself, and itself alone. Amid the pressure of great events, a general
principle gives no help. It is useless to revert to similar circumstances in the past.
[Ibid,]
10O
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METAHISTORY
And thus he was led to articulate one of his most famous apothegms:
The pallid shades of memory struggte^in vain with the life and freedom of the
present. [Ibid.]
History, Paul Vale"ry asserted much more bitterly nearly a century later,
"teaches precisely nothing." Hegel, however, would have emphasized the
"precisely" rather than, as Valery did, the "nothing." The reader of both
Universal and Pragmatic histories, then, is likely to grow "disgusted" with
them, in reaction either to their "arbitrariness" or to their inutility, and to
take refuge in the entertainment provided by the simple "narrative," which
adopts "no particular point of view."
What I have noted from Hegel's writings thus far adds up to this: we can
neither learn about history in toto from the historians nor learn very much
from them that is useful for the solutions of our own problems. What, then,
is the point of writing history at all, other than the aesthetic enjoyment of
the poetic creativity which attends the writing of "Original" history or the
moral sense of serving a cause which the writer of Pragmatic history may
delight in?
1'iOiii his characterization of the other two forms of "Reflective" history, it
would seem that, for Hegel, the reason for writing history is to be sought in
the transformations of consciousness which the attempt to do so effects in the
minds of historians themselves.
"Critical history" attains to a higher level of historical consciousness than
is manifested in the other two species of Reflective historiography, for here the
problem of bridging the gap between past and present is apprehended as a
problem in itself, which is to say a problem whose solution is not to be
provided by general or practical considerations {as in Universal and Pragmatic historiography), but by theoretical intelligence alone. For, in Critical
history, the historian criticizes both the sources and other historical accounts
of the subject he is studying, in an effort to extract their actual truth content
from them, so as to avoid the pitfalls of arbitrariness, fragmentariness, and
subjective interest which mar the preceding types of historiography. According to Hegel, Critical history-writing might be more properly called "a History of History." But, Hegel noted, this form of historical reflection has been
cultivated in the absence of any agreed upon criterion by which to establish
the relationship between the histories actually written and the objects they
represent. It tends to expend all of the historian's energy on the Critical
operation, so that, instead of the history of the subject, one gets a history of
various historians' histories of the subject. The inherently formalist nature of
this enterprise is shown by the fact that the so-called "higher criticism" of
Hegel's own time in Germany manifestly substituted all sorts of subjective
fancies for the conceptual apparatus that a genuinely critical history would
not only display but also defend in rational arguments: "fancies whose merit
101
is measured by their boldness, that is, in the scantiness of the particulars on
which they are based, and the peremptoriness with which they contravene
the best established facts of history." (.7)
Thus, when we arrive at the last species of reflective history, Conceptual
history (the histories of art, religion, law, and the like), we have no reason to
be surprised by the fact that it "announces its fragmentary character on the
very face of it" (ibid.). Conceptual history adopts an "abstract position," but
it also "takes a general point of view." It thereby provides the basis for a
transition to Philosophical history/the third class of historical reflection for
which Hegel's own work is supposed to provide the principles (7-8), because
such branches of a nation's or a people's life as its art, laws, and religion
stand in the most intimate relation to the "entire complex of its annals" that
is, the realm of social and cultural praxis in general. Hence Conceptual history necessarily raises the question of "the connection of the whole" (der
Zusammenhang des Ganzen), which a nation's history represents as an
actuality and not merely as an idea yet to be actualized, or not merely
grasped as an abstraction but actually lived. (9 [19]). The articulation of
the principles by which the content of a people's history as well as its own
ideal apprehension of its way of life are to be extracted from its "annals/'
and the ways in which the relationships arnbng all these are to be explicated
—these form the aim of the third class of historical reflection, the Philosophical, which is "the object of [Hegel's] present undertaking" (8).
<*§ History in and for Itself
Now, it is obvious that the four species of Reflective history provide a typically
Hegelian characterization of the stages of historical consciousness which are
possible within the class of historical consciousness for itself. Original history
is a product of historical consciousness in itself, and Philosophical history is
a product of that same consciousness in and for itself. Reflective history can
be broken down into the categories of the in-itself (Universal history), the
for-itself (Pragmatic history), and the in-and-for-itself (Critical history),
with the fourth type (Begriffsgeschichte) serving as the transition to, and
basis of, the new class, Philosophical history. This is so because the fourth
species begins in the. (Ironic) apprehension of the necessarily arbitrary and
fragmentary character of all genuinely historical knowledge of particular
parts of history.
As Hegel said later on-, historians must deal with events and subjects in
their concreteness and particularity; they betray their calling when they fail
to do so. But this means that their perspective is always limited and restricted.
This limitation is the price they pay for trying to re-present a past life in all
its ideality and concreteness; they serve their purpose best when they do not
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METAHISTORY
seek to rise above the mere reconstruction of the past and try to adduce from
their knowledge of the concrete event the universal principles which link a
specific past life to its total context.^
Philosophical history, however, asks what principles are necessary to make
sense out of representations of the parts of the historical world provided by
different Reflective histories. Philosophical history, Hegel said, can be defined
as simply "the thoughtful consideration"' (die denkende Betrachtung) of
history (ibid. [20]). That is to say, it is not the bringing to bear of reason
upon the individual facts of history in the interest of adducing new facts
from those known, or of correcting the accounts given by "Reflective" historians in the execution of their legitimate, though limited, tasks; it is "thoughtful reflection" on the works produced by historians. Hegel supposed that, if
the works produced by historians cannot be synthesized in the light of the
general principles of reason, in the way that the works of physicists or chemists can be, history cannot claim the status of a science at all. For, if the
historian were to say that he has added to our knowledge of humanity, culture, or society in the history he has written, but then deny that thought
can legitimately generalize about the significance of the structures and
processes truthfully (though incompletely) represented in those histories,
this would be to set a restriction on both history and thought which neither
science nor philosophy could sanction.
It should be noted that in stressing the fragmentary and arbitrary character
of every historical woik actually produced t>y historians, Hegel took his stand
within the Ironic position to which Enlightenment thinking had been pushed
by its apprehension of the arbitrary nature of its own historical reflection.
But, instead of concluding, as the Romantics did, that one could then make
of history what one would, Hegel insisted that reason alone must claim the
authority-to extract the truth (however partial) from these imperfect accounts
of the past and to weld them together into the basis for a genuine science of
history—not, mind you, into a science of history, but into the theoretical basis
for a science of history. As he put it, "The only thought which philosophy
brings to the contemplation of history, is the simple conception of reason,
that reason might be the sovereign of the world, and the history of the world
therefore might present to us [the aspect of] a rational process" (ibid.). This
conviction, he warns, "is a hypothesis in the domain of history as such"
(ibid.). It is not such in philosophy, for, without absolutely presupposing it,
philosophy itself would not be possible. If Begriffsgeschichte serves as the
transition stage between Reflective and Philosophical history, it must be
construed in the mode of simple self-conscious ness—that is, as Philosophical
history in itself. Hegel's problem was to articulate the principles that would
inform such historical self-consciousness for itself— that is, in the mode of
Begriffsgeschichte reflecting upon its own operations and its relationship to
its subject.
To conceive the problem thus is to move from the naive Irony, of a mode
HEGEL .
IO3
f historical reflection which simply assumes the arbitrariness and fragmennature of its findings to that which strives to grasp that inner connectedL by which events are endowed with a specific historicity. This effort will
ecessarily carry thought through the consideration of the Metaphorical, the
Metonymical, and the Synecdochic characterizations of the objects occupying
the historical field and of the relations among them (both causal and typological), to a higher stage of Ironic self-reflection, on which the essential
meanings of both historical consciousness and historical being are exposed to
philosophical reflection on their essential natures. As thus conceived, the aim
of philosophy of history is to determine the adequacy of historical consciousness to its object in such a way that the "meaning of history" is perceived as
both a fact of consciousness and a lived reality. Only then will historical
consciousness have been raised to a level beyond Irony, to a level of reflection
on which it will not only be in itself and for itself but also by, in, and for
itself—that is, at one with its object.
Of course, all these anticipations of the level beyond Irony to which historical consciousness might ascend were articulated in Hegel in the full
consciousness of the impossibility of ever arriving at such a state of integration
of subject and object within historical time. The higher truth of historical
consciousness and historical being, which must be supposed ultimately to be
the same truth, the truth of reason's rule over history and of the rational
aspect which history bears to the consciousness sufficiently reflective to grasp
its essence, is, finally, a truth of philosophy. Though art may grasp this truth
in its concreteness and formal coherence, and religion may name it as the
truth of God's governance of His world, philosophy itself can never name it,
because, as Hegel said, philosophy knows that "the Truth is the Whole," and
"the Absolute is Life."
But all these considerations are inconsequential for the more modest aim
of working out the bases on which the imperfect and fragmentary truths
provided by individual historians can be legitimately considered as the
subject matter of a possible science of history. And they are outweighed by
the fact that the historical process alone provides us with a necessary part of
the materials on the basis of which we can envisage a science of human
nature. Philosophy, Hegel wrote, is nothing but the attempt to satisfy "the
wish for rational insight" (10). It is not "the ambition to amass a mere heap
of acquirements"—that is to say, the data that have to be "presupposed" as
the possession of every practitioner of a specific discipline (ibid.). "It the
clear idea of Reason is not already developed in our minds, in beginning the
study of Universal history, we should at least have the firm, unconquerable
faith that Reason does exist there; and that the world of intelligence and
conscious volition is not abandoned to chance, but must show itself in the
light of the self-cognisant [sich wissenden] idea" (io[22]).
Yet, Hegel insisted, he was "not obliged to make any such preliminary
demand upon [the reader's] faith," for "What I have said thus provisionally
104
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METAH1STORY
. . . is to be regarded . . . as a summary view of th£ whole; the result of the
investigation we are about to pursue . . . the ultimate result" of an investigation that will "proceed historically—empirically" (ibid.). This means that
one must "faithfully adopt all that is historical" as material for reflection,
even though the terms "faithfully" and "adopt" are ambiguous in the
extreme (11). That hypotheses regarding the ultimate rationality of the
world process are to be applied to the data supplied by the historians in the
various "modes" in which historians reflect (ibid.), Hegel viewed as no cause
for alarm, for, in history as in science, even the most "impartial" historian,
"who believes and professes that he maintains a simply receptive attitude,
surrendering himself to the data supplied him, is by no means passive as
regards the exercise of his thinking powers. He brings his categories with
him, and sees the phenomena presented to his mental sight exclusively
through these media" (ibid.). The philosopher reflecting on history must only
be sure to keep his reason alive and in full play throughout his investigation.
Given the nature of reason itself, the result must be a rational account of
history as a rationally comprehensible process, for, "To him who looks upon
the world rationally, the world in turn presents a rational aspect. The relation
is mutual" (ibid.). The important point is that this rational aspect should
not be entertained as a merely formal coherence. The laws that govern
history must be apprehended as inhering in the historical process itself, as it
unfolds in time, in the same way that, in science, the actual operations of
nature are grasped rationally in the form of the laws that are used to conceptualize it. (12)
The way beyond Irony leads, by a path which circumvents the simply
naive or religious conviction that history is ruled by Providence, to the scientific—that is, rational and empirical—demonstration of the providential
nature of history, not insofar as the life of an individual man or group is
concerned, but rather in respect of the life of the species. The appeal to
belief in Providence is forbidden, according to Hegel, "because the science
of which we have to treat proposes itself to furnish the proof (not indeed
the abstract Truth of the doctrine, but) of its correctness as compared with
the facts." And this "correctness as compared with the facts" requires that
we begin with the recognition that, considered empirically, as merely a field
of happening simply perceived, mankind is, above all, ruled by passions. This
means that any explanation of history must "depict the passions of mankind,
the genius, the active powers that play their part on the great stage," and
show, by a demonstration that is both rational and empirical, that this chaos
of facts can be conceived not only to have a form but that it also actually
manifests a plan (Endzweck). (13) To disclose the general aspect of this
plan, to purport to reveal "the ultimate design of the world," implies the
"abstract definition" of the "meaning" (Inhalt) of this design and the provision of the evidence of its actualization (Verwirklichung) in time (16 [29])Now, in the paragraphs that follow, I will point out Hegel's dilation on
105
ature of that "spirit" which he conceived to be the agency by which the
nies of thought, feeling, and existence experienced by man are finally
nscended in the apprehension of a possible integration of consciousness
•fh being. I will give only a summary sketch of his doctrine of spirit here,
'nee it appears in detail elsewhere—that is, in his Phenomenology, Logic,
nd Philosophy of Right. The important point is that he began his discussion
f spirit with an apprehension of a radical antithesis between spirit and
matter The term "World," he said, "includes both physical and psychical
nature." He admitted that physical nature plays a part in world history, and
He also granted that an account of its mechanical operations would have to
he provided where it bore upon his subject. But his subject was the spirit,
the "nature" of which can be characterized in terms of its "abstract characteristics": the "means" it uses to realize its idea or to actualize itself in time;
and the "shape" which the perfect embodiment of spirit would assume.
Spirit, Hegel said, can be understood as the opposite of matter, the nature
of which is to be determined by something extrinsic to itself. Spirit is "selfcontained existence" (bei-sich-selbst-sein), which is to say "freedom," for
freedom is nothing but independence or autonomy, the absence of all
dependence upon, or determination by, anything outside itself. Self-contained existence, he continued, is also self-consciousness—consciousness of
one's own being, which is to say, consciousness of that which one is potentially capable of becoming. Hegel took this abstract definition of self-consciousness to be the analogue of the very idea of history: "it may. be said of
Universal History that it is the exhibition of spirit in the process of working
out the knowledge of that which it potentially is" (17-18). And, insofar
as history is process, actualization in time, this working out of the knowledge
of what spirit potentially is, is also the actualization, or realization, of what
it is potentially able to become. Since self-consciousness is nothing but
freedom, it must be supposed that the actualization of spirit in time figures
the growth of the principle of freedom. Thus, Hegel wrote, "The history of
the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."
And this insight, he said, provided him with "the natural division of universal
history atid suggests the mode of its discussion." (19)
<&% The Historical Field as Structure
There are two crucial passages in the Introduction to Philosophy of History
in which Hegel characterizes the historical field as a problem to be solved in
its aspect as a set of phenomena from which the critical intelligence must be
expected to extract a meaning. These two characterizations are quite different in nature, and they will reward close study for the determination of
their individual characteristics.
HEGEL
106
107
METAHISTORY
In his first characterization of the historical field, Hegel considered it as a
synchronic structure, apprehended as a chaos of/ passions, self-interest, vidlence, dashed hopes, and frustrated .glans and projects. In his second characterization of the historical field, he considered it as a diachronic process, as a
field which appears to be characterized by mere change. The first characterization was meant to serve as a basis for the generation of the concepts by
which the field, considered as a chaos of passions, could be comprehended
as a spectacle of purpose. The second characterization was meant to serve as
a basis for the generation of the concepts by which the field, considered as a
chaos of changes, could be comprehended as a process of development.
The first characterization of the historical field, as a field of phenomena,
was given in the Metaphorical mode, which is to say, not as mere phenomena
but as phenomena named, Hegel characterized the historical field which
offers itself to "external and phenomenal" intuition in terms of its aesthetic
form, the moral implications of the form offered, and the philosophical question which the combination of these necessarily raises. Thus, he said,
The first glance at history convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their
needs, their passions, their characters and talents, and impresses us with the belief
that zuch needs, passions, and interest are the sole spings <~f, ?.::...•—&p efficient
agents in this scene of activity. [20]
True, Hegel noted, even on this level of comprehension we may very well
discern actions and projects undertaken out of devotion to "aims of a liberal
or universal kind," such as "benevolence" or "noble patriotism," but such
"virtues and general views are but insignificant as compared with the world
and its doings." Reason itself may display its effects to the understanding,
but, on the basis of the data themselves, we have no reason to deny that
the "most effective springs of human action" are "passions, private aims, and
the satisfaction of selfish desires." (Ibid.)
When we reflect on this "spectacle of passions" (Schauspiel der Leidenschaften) and perceive the essential irrationality both of evil and of "good
designs and righteous aims," when we "see the evil, the vice, the ruin that
has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which' the mind of man ever
created," we can scarcely avoid being hurled into an essentially Absurdist
conception of the drama there displayed. The whole of history thus viewed
appears to bear the mark of "corruption," and, since this "decay is not the
work of mere nature, but of the human will" itself, "a moral embitterment"
(einer moralische Betriibnk) and "a revolt of the good spirit, if it have a
place within us," may well arise within us. (20-21) A merely aesthetic or,
what amounts to the same thing, "simply truthful combination of the
miseries that have overwhelmed the noblest of nations and polities and the
finest exemplars of human virtue" forms a "picture of such a horrifying
aspect" (furchtbarsten Gemdlde), and inspires emotions of such profound
sadness, that we are inclined to take refuge in fatalism and to withdraw in
disgust 'into the more -agreeable environment of our individual life, the
present formed by our private aims and interests" f 21).
Rut this moral response to an aesthetic perception itself inspires reflection
a question which "involuntarily arises" within any consciousness in which
on
reason has play. The question is: "to what principle, to what final aim have
these enormous sacrifices been offered?" (ibid.).
When we reach this point, Hegel said, the usual procedure is to undertake
the kind of investigation which he characterized as "Reflective history"—that
is causal and typological reductions, by which the field can be "arbitrarily"
and "fragmentarily" ordered. On the other hand, Hegel purported to resist
such reductive strategies by taking "these phenomena which [make] up a
picture so suggestive of gloomy emotions and thoughtful reflections as the
very field" [Hegel's italics] which exhibits the "means [italics added] for
realizing . . . the essential destiny . . . or . . . the true result of the world's
history" (ibid.). Moral reflection, he insisted, cannot serve as a method of
historical understanding. The causal and typological reductions of the historical field inspired by such moral reflection, even though attempted in the
interest of dissipating depression by understanding, can at best only explain
away the phenomena they are intended to explain and at worst only confirm
cur fears regarding the essential absurdity of the giutwse £?£ the whole. History
is a "panorama of sin and suffering," and any view of history which requires
denial of this fact of perception is untrue to the principles of art, science,
and morality alike. Hegel thus fully credited the immediate perception of
the historical field as "a panorama of sin and suffering." But he set his
perception of this panorama within the means-ends question which he
insisted is raised in the consciousness by moral reflection on it ("to what
principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered").
In short, "sin and suffering" must be viewed as the means for the realization of some principle that is superior to them. This superior principle is not
given to sense perception but is considered to be knowable in principle by a
transcendental deduction of the categories by which it can be inferred—the
kind of deduction that Kant carried out with respect to natural phenomena
and science. Hegel characterized the end of the whole process as "PrinciplePlan of Existence-Law," which, he admitted, is a "hidden, undeveloped
essence, which as such, however true in itself, is not completely real
[wivklich]" (22 [36]). The conceivable final cause, or principle yet to be
realized in concrete existence, must be recognized as ultimately unknowable
to science inasmuch as it is still in the process of actualization in history.
Thought must therefore begin with the data there before it and the apprehension of them as a means to some greater end.
Hegel thus accepted as a truth that insight into history which had driven
the philosophes to despair and the Romantics to heights of buoyancy and
exhilaration—namely, the fact that "passion" alone is the immediate cause of
all historical events. "We may affirm absolutely," he said, "that nothing great
108
METAH1ST0RY
has been accomplished in the world without passion [nichts Grosses in der
~Welt ohne Leidenschaft vollbracht worden istWf (23 [38]). The historian
thus has as his object of study precisely what appears before him: a panorama
of sin and suffering. But he also has his "concept" (Begrifi), which is the
means-ends relationship, and its "idea" {Idee), which is the full realization,
by concrete actualization, of all the beings that appear in history as recognizably historical (as against merely natural) entities, by which to extract meaning from this panorama. Both Metonymical reduction and Irony are to be
avoided by bracketing the data (the panorama of sin and suffering) within
the concept adequate to their apprehension as a means to some end:
Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of our investigation; the first, the
idea, the second the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the
woof of the vast arras-web of history. [Ibid.]
Thus, passion, "which is [conventionally] regarded as a thing of sinister
aspect" and as "more or less immoral," is not only recognized as a fact of
human existence but is elevated as a necessary and desirable condition for
the achievement of ends greater than any which an individual man or group,
governed by private interests or traits of character, can possibly imagine. The
severance of passion from the higher human ends which individuals and
• groups actually realize in time is thus overcome. The dualism of reason and
passion which the Enlighteners had failed to overcome (by Metonymical
analysis) is transcended along with the (Romantics') false monism of passion's hegemony over reason and the (Subjective Idealists') false monism of
reason's absolute hegemony over passion. The instrument of mediation
between passion and reason was conceived by Hegel to be the state—not the
state mechanism, which is only a means of such mediation in concrete
existence, but the state in its ideal essence, the state as objectified morality.
The "concrete mean" and "union" of the idea and passion is "liberty,
under the conditions of morality in a state." (Ibid.).
**% The State, the Individual, and the Tragic View of History
The ideal state, Hegel noted, would be that in which the private interests of
its citizens are in perfect harmony with the common interest, "when the one
finds its gratification and realization in the other" (24). But every actual
state, precisely because it is a concrete mechanism, an actualization rather
than merely a potentiality or a realization of the ideal state, fails to attain
this harmonious reconciliation of individual interests, desires, and needs with
the common good. This failure of any given state to incarnate the ideal,
however, is to be experienced as a cause for jubilation rather than despair,
for it is precisely this imbalance of private with public (or public with
private) interests which provides the space for the exercise of a specifically
HEGEL
IO9
human freedom. If any given state were perfect, there would be no legitimate
basis for that dissatisfaction which men feel with their received social and
olitical endowments, justification for the moral indignation which stems
from the disparity between what men desire for themselves and feel, because
it is the only criterion of right they immediately feel, to be a morally justifiable desire, and what the community into which they are born and are asked
to live out their lives insists that they should desire. Human freedom, which
is a specifically moral freedom, arises in the circumstance that no "present"
is ever adequately "adapted to the realization of aims which [men] hold to
be right and just." There is always an unfavorable contrast between "things
as they ere and things as they ought to be." (35) But this precondition of
freedom is also a limitation on the exercise of it; every attempt to correct or
improve the state, by reform or revolution, succeeds only in establishing some
new mechanism which, however superior it may be to what came before, is
similarly limited in its capacity to reconcile private interests and desires with
the common good and needs.
The aim, Hegel suggested, is to retain awareness of the Ironic (that is,
paradoxical and contradictory) nature of this uniquely human condition-,
which is a product of the very distinction between private and public interests. For this alone permits consciousness to believe in the possibility of its
own exercise of freedom and the legitimacy of the feelings of dissatisfaction
which impel it to the further perfection of the forms of human community
in which all private interests and the public good may be identified.
Nothing was more common in his own time, Hegel remarked, than "the
complaint that the ideals which imagination sets up are not realized, that
these glorious dreams are destroyed in cold actuality" (ibid.). Such complaints, however, are, he insisted, products of a merely sentimental character,
if those who make them condemn the social condition as such simply
because their ideals have not been realized in their own time. It is easier,
Hegel said, to find deficiencies in individuals, states, and the whole historical
process than to "discern their real import and value" (36). "For in this
merely negative fault-finding a proud position is taken," and the positive
aspect pi every historical situation, its provision of the conditions for realizing
a limited freedom, is overlooked (ibid.). Hegel's own perspective was meant
to reveal that "the real world," with its contradictoriness and conflict, its
limited freedom and suffering, "is as it ought to be" for the achievement of
human ends by means adequate to the task (ibid.). The spirit of this assertion accords with the saying of Seneca with which Vico (misquoting) ends
Book V of The New Science: "Pusilla res hie mundus est, nisi id, quod
quaerit, omnis mundus habeat" (1096: 415).
This does not mean that the individual is exempted from a Tragic fate
in the pursuit of his aims. On the contrary, it means that those who pursue
tieir own aims with a passion, a will and intelligence adequate to their
immediate realization—that is, the actual transformation of their societies
no
METAHISTORY
in the light of their privately held conceptions of what a good life might be
—will be Tragic figures. The ordinary man, He*el said, holds fast to what his
society insists must be the limits within which Tie may realize his desires and
private interests. The criminal see"£s to evade the laws and the limits set by
public morality by subterfuge, in such a way as to realize his private desire
for material satisfaction, but without effecting any substantial changes in the
canons of public morality and law in the process. (Phil, of Hist, 28-29) Bv
contrast, the heroes of history are precisely those whose passionate belief in
the legitimacy of their own private aims and interests is such that they cannot
abide any disparity between what they desire for themselves and what the
public morality and legal system demand of men in general. Caesar, for
example, in seeking the realization of his own ideal self-conception, succeeded in completely reconstituting Roman society. Great men, Hegel noted,
form "purposes to satisfy themselves, not others," and they are those who do
not learn from others but from whom others learn (30). The great conflicts
between an individual will, adequately endowed for its task, and the received
social order, whose devotees seek to sustain its achieved form, constitute the
axial events of world history; and it is with the "comprehensive relations"
which are figured in such encounters that world history has to do (29).
¥•:•• this reason, the spectacle uf history, when viewed from within the
p.ocess of its own unfolding, from the vantage point of tie individuals who
. succeeded in actually changing the form of life of a people or of many peoples—or, it might be adced, in resisting ham: ciFurs: faj effect such transformations—is conceivable as a specifically Tragic Drama. On the ground of
historical consciousness alone, without t i e superaddition of the hypothesis
which philosophical reflection brings to history—that is to say, on the basis of
a combination of aesthetic and moral sensibility alone—one is able to transform the history of the world from an Absurdist Epic of senseless conflict
and strife into a Tragic Drama with a specifically ethical import. Thus,
Hegel wrote:
If we go on to cast a look at the fate of world historical personalities . . . we shall
find it to have been no happy one. They attained no cairn enjoyment; their whole
life was labor and trouble; their whole nature was nothing but their master passion. When their object is attained they fall off like empty hulls from the kernel.
They die early, like Alexander; they are murdered, like Caesar; transported to St.
Helena, like Napoleon. [31]
In short, they lived their lives like the heroes of a Shakespearean Tragedy.
And the danger of a merely moral reflection upon their lives is that it might
lead to the conclusion, similar to that which "any simply truthful account" of
the historical field inspires, that their lives had been as meaningless, as inconsequential, as the lives of those ordinary men who rested content with the
roles in which fate had cast them.
Such a view, however, is possible only on the grounds provided by the
HEGEL
111
nvmical mode of comprehension, which, being based on a false analogy
ifrween nature and history, sees every action only as the effect of some prior,
M hanical, cause. Thus, the subjective impulse behind the act—the will,
eC
o r emotions of the individual who strives for something great—is
r
, /j t 0 the Same essential nature as that of the ordinary man, who strives
f nothing great at all and, as a result, leaves no mark on history except in
his function as a unit of an aggregate. It is small wonder, Hegel remarked
1 ter on that those who begin with the assumption that history is only nature
• a different guise are led by the logic of the mode of explanation suitable
for comprehending nature alone to the conclusion that history has no meaning, for
The state of nature is [in fact] predominantly that of injustice and violence, of
untamed natural impulses, of inhuman deeds and feelings. [41]
If man were "mere nature," we would be as unable to account for the
domestication of the ordinary run of mankind as we are unable to account
for the origination of that "social state" which is the instrument of that
domestication. Moreover, we would be forced to conclude that the highest
achievements of individual geniuses in art, science, religion, and philosophy
were products of a consciousness that was not essentially different from that
which characterizes man in his savage condition; that they reflect merely
rearrangements, rather than progressive perfections, of a finite number of
elements, all of which must be presumed to have been present in the savage
state.
But the truth is that savage man does not create anything of specifically
high cultural significance except religion and a rudimentary (customary)
form of society. This permits us to conclude that the "form of religion"
determines the form of the state that arises on the principles of consciousness
which inform it {51) and gives to the culture of a people its distinctive
aspect (50). But to presume that the same form of consciousness which
characterizes the savage mind also characterizes the civilized mind is to
weight the scales of analysis in favor of the discover)' of similarities alone
when what is needed is an assessment and an explanation of the differences
between the two states of consciousness and their products. Such a search for
similarities at the expense of differences lies at the basis of all those myths
of Arcadia, myths of the happy state of nature, which tantalized Enlightenment thinkers and inspired the Romantics to seek escape from the pains of
present existence in a nowhere land where nothing but happiness prevails.
The problem, then, is to explicate the principles by which the development of mankind through history can be comprehended. This development,
considered in its diachronic aspect, will appear as a transition from a lower
condition to a higher one, and, in its aspect as a synchronic structure, will
appear as a coherent system of exchange between the principle of savagery
and that of civilization.
112
METAHISTORY
<Ǥ The Historical Field as Process
This carries us to the level of comprehension on which Synecdochic consciousness replaces causal explanation by typological explanation and on
which the image of mere chaos is replaced by that of a succession of forms
or types of cultural achievement, the immediate apprehension of which is
given under the aspect of Tragedy. It is here that Hegel made the remark
which has so often been misinterpreted as evidence of the essentially formalist nature of his own philosophy of history. He wrote:
The investigator must be familiar a priori (if we like to call it so), with the whole
circle of conceptions to which the principles in question belong—just as Kepler
(to name the most illustrious example of this mode of philosophizing) must have
been familiar a priori with ellipses, with cubes and squares, and with ideas of their
relations, before he could discover, from the empirical data, those immortal
"Laws" of his, which are none other than forms of thought pertaining to those
classes of concepts. He who is unfamiliar with the science that embraces these
abstract elementary conceptions is as little capable—though he may have gazed
on the firmament and the motions of the celestial bodies for a lifetime—of understanding those Laws, as of discovering them. [64; italics added]
Here Hegel distinguished between the "circle of conceptions" and the
"principles" of characterization, and between the "forms of thought" and
the "classes of concepts" which the forms of thought utilize in the explanation of data of different sorts. Principles and classes of concepts which are
permissible in the characterization of the historical process derive from the
circle of conceptions by which various forms of thought are, simultaneously
differentiated from, and related, to one another. If a merely a priori
method, by which a preconception inspired by a prejudice is simply imposed
upon the historical record as an explanation of it, is to be avoided, there
must be some principle by which a given form of thought can be directed to
the articulation of the classes of concepts necessary for the distinction
between what is "essential" and what is not in a given aspect of the world
process. In the circle of conceptions, determinancy and freedom are conceived to generate the principles, forms of thought, and classes of concepts
adequate for the characterization and understanding of the natural and historical processes respectively. It is here that thought about history is exposed
to the dangers of mechanism, by confusion of a historical with a merely
natural process, and to the threat of formalism, by the simple recognition
of a succession of formal coherencies in the historical process.
The concepts which the consideration of history as a process of development requires are beginning, middle, and end, but not conceived in the
mode by which such processes are apprehended in physical nature—that is,
as merely inauguration, extension and expansion, and termination. Histori-
HEGEL
I nrocesses must be regarded as analogous to the kinds of completed
° ral actions which we enjoy in the contemplation of the highest products
f art and religion—that is, as processes which originate as a "commenceent" proceed through a "dialectical" transformation of the contents and
f mis' of the original disposition, and culminate in a "consummation or
lution" ^3)- figures more than a mere termination.
Physical nature as such has no beginning, middle, or end; it is always and
eternally what it has to be. We can imagine it coming into existence at a
eiven time and ending at a given time, but it does not develop in its passage
from one instant to another, which is why we say that it exists only in space
(72). Organic nature, it is true, does represent a kind of development which
can be conceived as a realization of the potential for growth contained in the
seed- but the individual may or may not realize this potential. If it does, it
comes to an end that is preordained by natural law—in such a way that every
growth process carried to its termination is precisely like every other, there
being no development from one individual to another, and no development
in the whole of organic life from one species to another. Here, insofar as
there is movement at all, there is no development, only cyclical recurrence..
Significant transitions in history, however, display the kind of gain which
we often intuit to be present, even when we cannot specify its content, at the
end of a Tragic play or a philosophical dialogue carried out in the dialectical
mode. In it, when something dies, something else is born; but that which is
bom is not merely the same thing in its essence as that which has died, as it
is in plant and animal life. It is something new in which the earlier form of
life—the action of the play, the argument of the dialogue—is contained
within the later form of life as its material or content, which is to say it is
turned from an end in itself into a means for the attainment of a higher end
only dimly apprehended in the afterglow of the resolution.
This insight into the nature of the historical process is built upon the
Synecdochic inflation of the Metaphorically apprehended and Metonymically
comprehended field of historical happening originally perceived as "a panorama of sin and suffering." The dynamics of this Synecdochic inflation are
signaled; in Hegel's second major characterization of the whole historical
field, now conceived not merely as chaos but as change as well.
Hegel's second characterization of the historical field begins with the
famous apothegm,
History in general is therefore the development of spirit in time, as nature is the
development of the idea in space. [Ibid.]
The word which is conventionally rendered in English as "development" in
this context is the German Auslegung, literally a "laying out, spreading out,
or display" with secondary associations of "explanation" or "explication"—
from the Latin roots ex and plicare, which, combined, convey the notion of a
114
HEGEL -
METAHISTORY
"smoothing out" of wrinkles, as in a crumpled piece of paper or cloth. The
connotation is that of an unfolding or clarification of latent contents.
But the apprehension of this process for what'it truly is cannot be provided
by Synecdochic inflations alone. This is pointed out in the passage which
follows. Here the same transition of consciousness from an aesthetic, through
a moral, to an intellectual perception which we encountered in Hegel's
original characterization of the historical field in the modes of Metaphor
and Metonymy are recaptitulated:
If then we cast a glance over world-history in general, we see a vast picture of
changes and deeds [Tafen], of infinitely manifold forms of peoples, states, individuals, in unresting succession [Aufeinanderfolge]. [Ibid]
This spectacle of the succession of forms arouses an emotional state which is
quite different from that which the spectacle of chaos originally described
arouses:
Everything that can enter into and interest the soul of man—all our sensibility to
goodness, beauty, and greatness—is called into play. [Ibid.]
We still see "human action and suffering predominant," but we also see
something akin to ourselves that "excites our interest for or against,"
wheiher that something" attracts our attention by its "beauty, freedom,
and rich variety" or by its "energy" alone (ibid.).
Sometimes we see the more comprehensive mass of some general interest advancing with comparative slowness, and subsequently sacrificed to an infinite complication of trifling circumstances, and so dissipated into atoms. Then again with a
vast expenditure of power a trivial result is produced; while from what appears
unimportant a tremendous issue proceeds. On every hand there is the motliest
throng of events drawing us within the circle of its interest, and when one combination vanishes another immediately appears in its place. [Ibid.]
115
—that while death is the issue of life, life is also the issue of death." (72-73)
The problem which immediately suggested itself to Hegel was that of
the modality by which this succession of formal coherences is to be comprehended—that is to say, how the sequence of forms is to be emplotted. And in
the paragraphs which follow can be seen his differentiation among three
different plot structures that might be used to characterize this process conceived as a succession of forms, as distinguished from the Epic plot structure,
which might be used to emplot the spectacle of mere change in the original
apprehension of the historical field as chaos.
Reverting to nature (that is, to the Metonymical mode of characterizing
changes as such) for an analogue, this succession of forms might be conceived
in one of two ways, both of which might be called Tragic inasmuch as they
credit the apprehension of the fact that, in human nature at least, "while
death is the issue of life, life is also the issue of death" (italics added). For
example, the succession of forms might be emplotted as a transfer of a
content to a new form, as in the Oriental doctrine of metempsychosis; or it
might be conceived, not as a transfer, but as a ceaseless re-creation of a new
life out of the ashes of the old, as in the Phoenix myth. (73) Hegel called the
insight contained in the Oriental conceptions of the world process "grand,"
but denied them status as earned philosophical truths for two reasons. First,
this insight ("that while death is the issue of life, life is also the issue of
death") is unly generally true of nature, rather than specifically true of
natural individualities. Second, the simple notions of transfer and of successive recurrence do not do justice to the variety of life forms which the historical process, unlike the natural process, displays to perception. As Hegel put
it:
Spirit—consuming the envelope of Its existence—does not merely pass into
another envelope, nor rise rejuvenescent from the ashes of its previous form; it
comes forth exalted [erhoben], glorified [verkldrt], a purer spirit [ein reinerer
Geist]> It certainly makes war upon itself—consumes its own existence; but in this
very destruction it works up that existence into a new form, and each successive
phase becomes in its turn a material on which it exalts itself [erhebt] into a new
grade [BMung]. [Ibid.]
The first general thought that arises in response to the spectacle thus
apprehended, "the category which first presents itself in this restless mutation of individuals and peoples, existing for a time and then vanishing," is
that of "change in general" (die Verdnderung iiberhaupt). This apprehension is then quickly transmuted into a feeling of "sadness," such as that
which we might feel in the presence of the ruins of some mighty sovereignty,
Such as Rome, Persepolis, or Carthage. But the "next consideration, which
allies itself" with that of mere change and which arises from the recognition
of the formal coherences to be seen in the spectacle, is this: "that while
change imports dissolution, it involves at the same time the rise of a new Ufe
And this suggests another reason why this whole process cannot yet be
credited as prefiguring a Comic resolution. The principles in virtue of which
apprehension of the plot of the succession of forms might be permitted still
remain unexplicated. The explication of these principles requires a view
from a perspective within the process, so that it will not be apprehended as
merely a succession of formally equal coherences, but rather as a kind of
autonomous process of self-manipulation, exertions "in different modes and
directions," in which the prior form serves as the material for, and stimulus
to, the creation of its successor (ibid.). From this perspective,
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METAHISTORY
The abstract concept of mere change gives place to the thought of spirit manifesting, developing, and perfecting its powers in eveA, direction which its manifold
nature can follow. [Ibid.; italics added]"
The powers that the spirit which must be presumed to govern this process
inherently possesses can be learned only "from the variety of products and
formulations which it originates" (ibid.). This means that the historical
process must be viewed, not as mere movement, change, or succession, but
as "activity": "Der Geist handelt wesentlich, er macht sich zu dem, was er an
sich ist, zu einer Tat, zu seinem Werk; so wird er sich Gegenstand, so hat er
sich als ein Dasein vor sich" (72 [99])- Thus it was with historical individualities, those Tragic heroes who succeeded in leaving their societies at least
significantly transformed as a result of their exertions; and so it is with
whole peoples and nations, who are at once beneficiaries and captives of the
spiritual forms in which their exertions against the world and for the world
manifest themselves. This implies that the life of every people or nation is,
like the life of every heroic individual in history, a Tragedy. And the appropriate mode of its emplotment, the apprehension of it as a historical reality,
is that of the Tragic Drama. In fact, Hegel emplotted the histories of all the
civilizations! forms that he discerned in world history in Tragic terms. And
in his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences and the Lectures on Aesthetics, he provided the justification for this mode of emplotment as the
highest kind of reflective historiography.
In his Philosophy of History, however, he simply applied this mode of
figuring the process of origination, rise, dissolution, and death to individual
civilizations. He did not try to justify the Tragic mode of emplotment but
simply presupposed it as the appropriate mode for characterizing the processes of development which can be discerned in the life cycles of a specific
civilization, such as the Greek or the Roman. This mode can be presupposed
because it is that in which any comprehensive history of a civilization whose
term has run out is conventionally emplotted by professional historians. The
philosophically unselfconscious historian might draw erroneous conclusions
from his reflection on the pattern of rise and fall, with its aspect of fate and
inevitability. He might conclude that this pattern could not have been otherwise and that, because of what it is, it can be comprehended only as a
Tragedy en gros.
Contemplation of the historical process does yield the apprehension of it
as a sequence of Tragedies. What originally appeared as an Epic "spectacle
of passions" is transmutted into a sequence of Tragic defeats. Each of these
Tragic defeats, however, is an epiphany of the law that governs the whole
sequence. Yet this law of historical development is not conceived to be
analogous to the kinds of laws which determine the evolution or interaction
or physical bodies; it is not natural law. It is, rather, the law of history,
hich is the law of freedom that is figured in every human project culminat• o in a Tragic resolution. And this law figures the ultimately Comic outm e of the whole succession of forms which is immediately apprehended
under the aspect of Tragedy.
Hegel's purpose is to justify the transition from the comprehension of the
Traaic nature of every specific civilization to the Comic apprehension of the
unfolding drama of the whole of history. In the same way that, in Phenomenology of Spirit, he suggested that the Comic vision of Aristophanes was
superior to the moral insight contained in the Tragic vision of Euripides, in
his consideration of world history he sought to endow the whole of history
with a Comic import which is based upon, responsible to, yet transcends, the
implications of a merely Tragic conception of the course of historical life in
general
<&§ From Tragedy to Comedy
In the cycle of moral attitudes, Comedy is logically posterior to Tragedy,
for it represents an affirmation of the needs of life and its rights against the
Tragic insight that all things existing in time are doomed to destruction.
The death of a civilization is not strictly analogous to the death of an individual, even to that of a heroic individual. For, just as the heroic individual
finds a kind of immortality in the changes he effects in the life forms of the
people he molds to his will, so, too, a heroic people finds a kind of immortality in the changes it effects on the life forms of the race. A great people does
not die a "simply natural death," Hegel wrote, for a people "is not a mere
single'individual, but a spiritual, generic life." The deaths of whole civilizations are more like suicides than natural deaths, he continued, because as
genera they carry within themselves their own negations—"in the very generality which characterizes" them. (75)
A people sets for itself a task, which, generally considered, is simply to be
somethmg rather than nothing. Its whole life is bound up with, and its distinctive formal coherence is expressed in, its dedication (both conscious and
unconscious) to this task. But, as a task, this effort to be something requires
means, the specificity of which is implied in the concreteness of their application to specific rather than general problems. General tasks, such as merely
keeping body and soul together, reproducing, caring for children, protecting oneself from the elements, the activities of precivilized peoples, are
carried out in response to general human inclinations and instincts represented by custom, "a merely external sensuous existence which has ceased to
throw itself enthusiastically into its object" (74—75). But, in order to carry
out the task of becoming something particular and unlike the general run of
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METAHISTORY
mankind, a people must set itself both an ideal task and certain practical
ones, for the "highest point in the development M a people is this—to have
gained a conception of its [own] life and condition—to have reduced its laws,
its ideas of justice and morality to a science" (76). Here the unity of ideal
and real is achieved as completely as the nature of the human spirit itself
permits. It is never fully achieved, and in this asymmetry between the general intention and the specific means and activities used to effect its realization lies the Tragic flaw at the heart of every form of civilized existence.
This flaw is perceived for what it really is in the late stages of a civilization's
cycle; or, rather, when this flaw becomes perceptible for what it really is, the
civilization evidences a form of life grown stale and becomes imminently
moribund. When this flaw is perceived for what it really is—that is, as a
contradiction between the specific ideal which the civilization embodies and
the specific actualizations of that ideal in customary, institutional, social,
political, and cultural life, the cement that holds society together in devotion to the ideal, the sense of piety, duty, morality, begins to crumble. And
At the same time the isolation of individuals from one another and from the whole
makes its appearance. [Ibid.]
People begin to talk about virtue instead of practicing it; they demand
reasons why they should do their duties and find reasons not to do them; they
begin to live Ironically: speaking of virtue publicly, practicing vice privately,
but ever more openly (76-77).
By the transformation of practice into vice, however, this separation of
the ideal from the real is itself a purification of the ideal, a release of it
from the trammels of actualized existence, an opportunity for concrete
minds to grasp the ideal in its essence, to conceptualize and image it. Thus
they prepare the ideal for its release from the time and place in which it has
achieved its actualization and for transmission across time and space to other
peoples, who in turn can use it as the material out of which to further specify
the nature of human ideality in its essential purity.
Thus, Hegel said, if we wish a specific idea of what the Greeks were, we
will have to go to those records in which they naively revealed the modes of
their practical relationships in society. If we wish to know this idea in its
generality, its pure ideality, however, we shall "find it in Sophocles and
Aristophanes, in Thucydides and Plato" (76). The choice of these witnesses
of the ideal is not casual; they represent the late forms of Greek consciousness in tragedy, comedy, historiography, and philosophy, respectively, and
are to be distinguished quite clearly from their "naive" predecessors (Aeschylus, Herodotus, the pre-Socratic philosophers). The grasping of the
ideality of a people or civilization by consciousness is an act that at once
"preserves" and "dignifies" it. While the people falls into nullity and casual
catastrophe, surviving perhaps as a folk but declining as a power (in both the
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110
political and cultural sense), the spirit of that people is thus saved through
consciousness in thought and art as an ideal form.
While then, on the one side, spirit annuls the reality, the permanence of that
which it is, it gains on the other side, the essence, the thought, the universal
element of that which it only was. [77]
This grasping, by consciousness, of the inner essence of a finite mode of
actualization of the spirit in a heroic people must be seen, not as merely a
preservation, or mummification, of the ideal it represents, but rather as the
alteration of the spirit of the people itself—the raising of its principle to a
"another and in fact higher principle." It is this elevation, by consciousness
and in consciousness, of the ideal to another and higher principle that provides justification for belief in the ultimately Comic nature, the providential
nature, of the "panorama of sin and suffering" which perception immediately
finds in the data of history as a "simply truthful combination" of the facts.
And it is of the "highest importance," Hegel noted, that we understand "the
thought involved in this transition [dieses UbeTgangs]." The "thought"
alluded to is that contained in the contradiction of human growth and development, which is that, although the individual remains a unity throughout
the grades of his development, he does rise to a higher consciousness of
himself and does in fact pass from a lower and restricted stage of consciousness to a higher, more comprehensive one. So, too, Hegel said, decs a people
develop, at once remaining what it was in its essential being as a specific
people and at the same time developing until "it reaches the grade of universality." In this point, Hegel concluded, "lies the fundamental, the ideal
necessity of change [Verdnderung]," which is "the soul, the essential consideration, of the philosophical comprehension of history." (78)
This "comprehension," then, is founded on an apprehension of the historical process as a development toward the grade of universality, whereupon
the spirit in general "elevates and completes itself to a self-comprehending
totality" (ibid.). The necessity of every civilization's ultimate destruction
by its own hand is sublimated into an apprehension of that civilization's institutions and modes of life as only means, abstract modes of organization, by
which its ideal ends are realized. They are not eternal realities, and ought
not be considered as such. Their passing, therefore, should be of less retrospective "concern" than the death of a friend or even the death of those
Tragic heroes whose excellence can be identified with to such an extent that
we may experience their death as an intimation of our own.
Hegel presented his perception of the dissolution of institutions and modes
of life in the following metaphor:
The life of a people ripens to a certain fruit; its activity aims at the complete
manifestation of the principle which it embodies. But this fruit does not fall back
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METAHISTORY
into the bosom of the people that produced and matured it; on the contrary, ft
becomes a poison-draught to it. That poison-draught it cannot let alone, for it
has an insatiable thirst for it: the taste of the draugnt is its annihilation, though at
the same time the rise of a new principle. [Ibid.]
Comparison of this passage with those in which Hegel depicted and reflected
on the meaning of Socrates' life and death for Athenian culture as a whole
illuminates the use of the metaphor of the "poison-draught" which, once
consumed, ends an old life and establishes the principle of a higher one.
Socrates' death was Tragic as a spectacle of the death of a virtuous man and
as a revelation of the contradiction of his relationship to the Athenian people, to whom he taught a new principle of morality. Socrates, Hegel wrote,
was the "inventor of morality," and his death was necessitated as one of the
acts by which that principle was confirmed as a practical rule of life and not
merely affirmed as an ideal (269). His death was at once the death of the
teacher Socrates and the elevation of the principle by which he lived and died
into a concrete model of moral activity. His death showed not only that men
can live by a moral principle but that, when they die on behalf of it, they
transform it into an ideal by which others can live. The recognition that this
"death" is also the means to the transformation of human life and morality
itself onto a level of self-consciousness greater than the "life" which led up to
it, was, for Hegel, the informing insight of the Comic vision and the highest
comprehension of the historical process to which the finite mind can aspire.
The Comic vision, Hegel wrote in Phenomenology, transcends the fear
of "fate." It is
the return of everything universal into certainty of self, a certainty which, in consequence, is this complete loss of fear of everything strange and alien, and complete loss of substantial reality on the part of what is alien and external. Such
certainty is a state of spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto, on
the part of consciousness, in a way that, outside this kind of [Aristophanean]
comedy, is not to be found anywhere. [748-49]
This last remark, that the state of "spiritual good health and of self-abandonment thereto . . . is not to be found anywhere" outside a certain Comic
vision, suggests that the Comic nature of the historical process itself can be
apprehended (never comprehended except in abstract terms) only as a
possibility which enjoys the authority, on the basis of historical evidence
rationally processed, of high probability, because, as Hegel said in the introduction to his Philosophy of History, history has to do only with the past and
the present; of the future it can make no pronouncements. Yet, on the basis
of our comprehension of the historical process as a progressive development
which, beginning in remote times, has come down to our own present, the
twofold nature of history as a cycle and a progression is rendered clear to
consciousness. We can now see that
121
life of the ever present spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments, which
, j a j j n one aspect still exist beside one another, and only as looked at from
another point of view appear as past. [Phil, of Hist., 79]
And this means that the "grades which spirit seems to have left behind it"
not lost and abandoned but are still alive and retrievable "in the depths
c j . n e present" (ibid.). These words and this hope, with which Hegel closed
the Introduction to Philosophy of History, echo the closing paragraph of
Phenomenology of Spirit, with which he had opened the mature phase of his
own philosophical career:
The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its
pathway j n the recollection of spiritual forms (Geister) as they are in themselves
and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation, looked at from the side of their free existence appearing in the form of
contingency, is History; looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears.
Both together, or History {intellectually) comprehend (begriifen), form at once
the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit, the reality, the truth, the
certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless, solitary, and alone. Only
The chalice of this realm of spirits
Foams forth to God His own Infinitude.
I can now chart the dimensions and power of Hegel's conception of historical knowledge as a mode of explanation, representation, and ideological
implication. I begin by noting that the whole of it is a sustained effort to
hold the essential Irony of the human condition in consciousness without
surrendering to the skepticism and moral relativism into which Enlightenment rationalism had been led on the one hand or the solypsism into which
Romantic intuitionism had to be led on the other. This aim is achieved by
the transformation of Irony itself into a method of analysis, a basis for the
representation of the historical process, and a means of asserting the essential ambiguity of all real knowledge. What Hegel did was to bracket the
Metonymical (causal) and Metaphorical (formalist) strategies for reducing
phenomena to order within the modalities of Synecdochic characterizations
onsthe one hand and the self-dissolving certitudes of Irony on the other. The
principal certitude which is dissolved, however, is intellectual certitude, the
kind of certitude which breeds pride in the possession of a putatively absolute
truth about the whole. The only "absolute" truths that are permitted to the
finite intelligence are such "general" truths as "The truth is the whole"
and "The Absolute is life," both of which are liberating rather than repressive truths, inasmuch as they tacitly assert that absolute truth is possessed by
no single individual. But this kind of certitude is dissolved in such a way as
to promote that other kind of certitude, moral self-certitude, which is
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METAHISTORY
required for the living of an effectively "free" life, the existential truth that
everything is precisely as it ought to be, including one's desire regarding
what "ought to be," which means that one fi justified in affirming those
desires as his right against the social whole as long as he has the will, the
energy, and the means to do so. At the same time, it means that the will of
the group, the collectivity's conception of "what ought to be," which is
usually identical with "what is," is equally justified, so that the conflict of
finite individualities on the ground of history cannot be prejudged as to its
intellectual or moral worth prior to the conflict in which their claims to
authority and the allegiance of the mass of men are finally arbitrated. In the
end, then, it can be seen that Hegel's whole philosophy of history led from
an original Metaphorical characterization of the world-process through a
Metonymical reduction and Synecdochic inflation of the process in which its
various possible modes of relationship are explicated, to an Ironic comprehension of the ambiguity of the "meaning" of the process—until it came to
rest, finally, in the more general Synecdochic identification of the whole
process as a Drama of essentially Comic significance.
Thus, the mode of explanation of all historical events is immediately
Metonymical and Synecdochic, which justifies the characterization of any
spfirifir -.,vT-..-iV act of the Drama as a sequence of formal coherences governed
by causal laws (though the laws of causality invoked must be those of spirit,
or freedom, rather than those of nature, or determinancy). Accordingly, the
emplotment of any given segment of the whole process must be in the
Tragic mode, which is the mode in which the conflict between being and
consciousness is resolved as an elevation of consciousness itself to a higher
awareness of its own nature and, simultaneously, of the nature of being, an
epiphany of law. But the ideological implications of history so construed and
so emplotted remain ambiguous, because in a causal system there is neither
right nor wrong, but simply cause and effect, and in a formal system there is
neither better nor worse, but simply the end of formal coherence and the
means of realizing it.
In this interplay of causes and effects and means and ends, however, the
Ironic consciousness perceives the effects of which the whole interplay of
these elements is a cause and the end of which it is the means—that is to say,
the progressive elevation of humanity itself through the attainment of higher
forms of self-consciousness, the recognition of its differences from nature,
and the progressive clarification of the end of rational enlightenment, liberation, and human integration which the process from past to present manifests
as an undeniable trend. Thus, the whole series of Pathetic, Epic, and Tragic
Dramas contained in the historical record are sublated into a Drama of essentially Comic significance, a human Comedy, a theodicy which is a justification not so much of the ways of God to man as of man's own ways to himself.
Thus is suggested the essentially Comic issue, the ultimately integrative
and reconcihatory condition, toward which the whole process is tending. The
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esthetic sense affirms this as the form that the historical process assumes in
consciousness; the moral sense confirms it as what human self-certitude
enuires to be the case; and the intellectual sense, represented by reason,
explicates the principles in virtue of which both the perception and the desire
are rendered plausible. In the final analysis, the most that consciousness can
extract from reflection on history is only an aesthetic apprehension for which
there are good moral and rational grounds. The laws that govern the whole,
as well as the form which the whole will finally take, can be specified by
thought only in their most general terms.
The chalice of this realm of spirits
Foams forth to God His own Infinitude.
But the "owl of Minerva" takes its final flight only at the close of the cosmic
day. Until that rime, thought can deliver itself of the truth of history only
within finite provinces of meaning and in anticipation of the time when the
truth of the whole will be lived rather than simply thought
<Ǥ The Plot of World History
It should by now be a relatively simple matter to explicate the specific
principles of explanation and emplotment which Hegel utilized in his Philosophy of History proper. These are of interest in themselves, as the products
of a profound and well-informed historical intelligence, the wit as well as
the learning of which justify their study for themselves alone. But their real
worth lies in the texture of the narrative as Hegel illuminated a point here,
addumbrated a context there, threw in a speculative aside that later generations would have to labor for years to earn, and generally dominated the
historical record with an arrogance that is justified only by its profundity.
Yet, we can profitably linger on one or two points of the text, not only in
order to clarify Hegel's views on the nature of historical explanation and
representation in general, but also in order to demonstrate the consistency
with wKich he applied his own explicit principles of historical analysis.
It is a commonplace that Hegel broke down the history of any given
civilization and of civilization as a whole into four phases: the period of birth
and'original growth, that of maturity, that of "old age," and that of dissolution and death. Thus, for example, the history of Rome is conceived to
extend in its first phase from its foundation down to the Second Punic War;
in its second phase from the Second Punic War to the consolidation of the
Principate by Caesar; in its third phase from this consolidation to the
triumph of Christianity; and in its last phase from the third century A.D. to
the fall of Byzantium. This movement through four phases represents four
levels of civilizational self-consciousness: the phases of the in itself, the for
METAHISTORY
itself, the in and for itself, and the by, in, and for itself. These phases can also
be taken as marking out the elements of a Classi<ftfl Drama, with its phases
of pathos, agon, sparagmos, and anagoorisis, which have their spatial counterparts in the consolidation and dissolution of the elements of the Roman
spirit: conflict with foreign foes, expansion outward in the creation of an
empire, a turning back upon itself, and a dissolution which prepared the
ground for the advent of a new power, Germanic culture, for which Rome
itself was a subject and victim.
It is noteworthy that these phases can be regarded as indicating existential
relationships, as ways of explaining those relationships, as ways of representing them, or as ways of symbolizing their "meaning" within the whole process of Roman historical development. The important point is that, to Hegel,
what Rome was at any given stage of its evolution was not considered to be
reducible to what it did, to an effect of an exhaustive set of causes, to merely
a formal coherence (that is, generic case), or to a self-enclosed totality of
relationships. In other words, the identification of a historical state of affairs
as constituting a phase, the explanation of why it is what it is, the characterization of its formal attributes, and the relations which it sustains with other
phases of the whole process are all conceived to have equal worth as elements ot the total characterization of both the phases and the whole process
ih which they appear. Of course, to those who regard Hegel as nothing but
a practitioner of the a priori method of historical representation, all these
ways of characterizing a phase in the history of a civilization appear as nothing but projections of the categories of the dialectic: the in itself (thesis), the
for itself (antithesis), and the in and for itself (synthesis), followed by a
negation of the synthesis, which itself implies a new thesis (which is nothing
but a new in itself), and so on, without end.
It is true that one could effect such a conceptual reduction of Hegel's
method of analysis, and in a way that might not have offended Hegel himself, since he regarded these categories as fundamental to both logic and
ontology and as the key to the comprehension of any process, whether of
being or of consciousness.
But, in accordance with my way of characterizing his thought, in terms of
the linguistic modes utilized in his characterizations, not only of the stages of
being and logic, but also of history, I prefer to view these phases as conceptualizations of different modes of relationship in general as generated by
Hegel's insight into the levels on which language, and therefore consciousness itself, had to operate.
It will be remembered that Hegel characterized Rome as "the prose of
life," as against the "primeval wild poetry" of the East and "the harmonious
poetry" of the Greek way of life (Phil, of Hist, 288 [350]). This characterization is reminiscent of Vico's distinction among the ages of gods, of
heroes, and of men. The Romans lived not a "natural" but a "formal" way
of life, which is to say a life of extrinsicality and of relationships mediated
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125
hv force and ritual, a severed life which was held together only by the most
arduous exertions in the practical spheres of politics, positive law, and war,
but which left Kttle energy or will to create either a high art or a high
religion or philosophy, such as the Greeks created. In short, the Romans
abdrehended the world in the mode of Metonymy (that is, in terms of contiguities) and strove for a comprehension of it in a purely Synecdochic
system of relationships. The Roman "reality" was nothing but a field of
force, its ideality a world of formally ordered relationships—in time (ancestor
worship; possession of sons, wives, and daughters as property by the paterfanuluis; laws of inheritance, and so on) and in space (roads, armies, proconsuls, walls, and so on). Ironically, it fell victim to a world view and a
spirit which apprehended both its reality and its ideal in precisely opposed
terms. Christianity represents the denial of the efficacy of force for the
conquest of both space and time and of the value of any merely formal
relationships. The Christian apprehends the world as one term of a Metaphor, the other and dominant term of which, that by which the world is given
its meaning and identity, is conceived to exist in another world. And, far
from recognizing the claims of a Metonymical or Ironic comprehension of
the world, the Christian strives for the transcendence of all the tensions
between the ideal and reality which these very modes of comprehension
imply.
Once we have grasped the dynamics of the system by which Hegel characterized a given phase of the world historical process, we can understand more
clearly in presentday terms how he arrived at his notions of the origin and
evolution of world history and why he divided it into four major periods.
This division corresponds to the four modes of consciousness represented by
the modalities of tropological projection itself. For example, the condition
of savagery can be likened to that stage in which human consciousness lives
in the apprehension of no essential difference between itself and the world of
nature; in which custom dictates life without any recognition of the inner
tensions that might be generated in society by the right of the individual to
aspire to something other than what custom dictates as a possible aspiration;
in ignorance, superstitution, and fear, without any sense of a specific goal for
the folk as a totality; with no notion of history, but in an endless present;
with no sense of any abstract notion that might generate religious (as against
mythic), artistic (as against craft), and philosophical (as against concrete)
reflection; in a state of repression rather than of morality, which implies
the capacity to choose; and without any law other than the rule of the
strongest.
The transition from savagery to the great civilizations of the Orient and
Near East, the archaic cultures as they are called, can be likened to the
awakening of consciousness to the possibility of Metaphorical apprehension,
which is itself inspired by the sense of difference between that with which
one is familiar and that which is unfamiliar. Metaphor is the mode of bridg-
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126
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METAHISTORY
ing the gap between these two orders of apprehended reality, and in the
civilizations of the ancient Orient are examples of what is essentially a
Metaphorical mode of life and consciousness. The East, Hegel wrote, is
"unreflected consciousness—substantial, objective, spiritual existence . . . to
which the subject will sustain a relation in the form of faith, confidence,
obedience" (105). Thus, when Hegel likened the Orient to the period of
childhood in history, he was suggesting—as Vico had earlier—that the mode
of comprehending the world which emerges in that place at a certain time is
that of simple Metaphorical identification of the subject with the object.
The transition from the childhood of history to its adolescence goes by
way of Central Asia, where the individuality of the subject expressed itself
in the "boisterousness" and "turbulence" of the tribes which arose there and
which challenged the monolithic order imposed by the ruler on the subject,
on the basis of a unity that is sensed to exist but does not yet have its basis
in mutual self-consciousness (ibid., 106). The transition to the Greek world,
the adolescent phase, proceeded from the apprehension of the isolation of
the individual within the Metaphorical identification of the unity to the
affirmation of the ideal as individuality—that is, as self-contained cause—
which is to say, Metonymical reduction. As Hegel expressed it: "That which
in the East is divided into two extremes—the substantial as such, and the
individuality absorbed in it—meets here. But these distinct principles are
'only immediately in unity; and consequently involve the highest degree of
contradiction'' (107). This is why, in Hegel's view, Greek civilization only
appeared to be a concrete unity, why it blossomed very quickly, only to fade
and die as quickly as it had arisen. It lacked the principle in virtue of which
the very mode of conceiving the unity of part with whole was possible. Rome
conceived this mode of relationship, which was that of Synecdoche, but only
formally, abstractly, as duty, power, or might. Its "seriousness" represented
history's transition to manhood: "For true manhood acts neither in accordance with the caprice of a despot, nor in obedience to a graceful caprice of
its own; but works for the general aim, one in which the individual perishes
and realizes his own private object only in that general aim" (ibid.).
Thus far I have characterized the first three phases of a Classical Tragic
plot, with the first phase representing the pathos, or general state of feeling,
which opens the action; the second representing the agon, or conflict, which
carries it forth; and the third representing the tearing apart of the subject,
the sparagmos, which creates the conditions of the denouement and carries
the action forward to a resolution (anagnorisis). The three phases of this
Drama are not, however, to be resolved in the mode of Tragedy, even
though each phase describes a pattern of Tragic rise and fall. The phase or
reconciliation (anagnorisis) into which the action is carried by the essential
contradiction in Roman civilization and its spirit is marked, not by the
epiphany of the iron law of fate or justice which Classical Greek Tragedy
demanded as its resolution, but rather by the enclosure of what appears to
.
c n a law within the Christian (Comic) vision of the ultimate liberation
f man from his world and his ultimate reconciliation with God. The Tragic
' ion is annulled in the vision of the whole, which transcends the Irony
•frmlicit in the resolution of Classical Tragedy, in which, while something
PW is revealed to the consciousness, this something new is always set
aeainst the background of a still greater mystery, which is Fate itself.
Although the phase of history represented by the crystallization of a new
civilization in Western Europe might appear to be the entrance of humanity
into its "old age," this conclusion 'would be justified only if the proper
analogue of history were that of natural process. But, Hegel argued, history
is above all, "spirit," which means that in history, as against nature, "maturity" is the kind of "strength" and "unity" glimpsed in the Christian vision of
the "Reconciliation" of the Creation with the Creator (109). The Tragic
vision is thus transcended in the apprehension of the whole world process on
the analogy, not of nature or Classical Tragedy or even Classical Comedy
(which only asserts the right of life against the vision of fate given in Tragedy), but of the Christian "Divine Comedy," in which, in the end, as in
Dante's epic expression of its informing idea, everything finally comes to
rest in its appropriate place in the hierarchy of being. But the Christian
vision is itself only a Metaphorical apprehension of the truth of the whole.
Its articulation must be carried out through the agon and sparagmos of its
relationship with the world, which carries Western civilization through the
conflict of chuich and state in the Middle Ages and the conflict of the
nations in the early modern period to that point at which the whole process
of history is finally comprehended in principle as the drama of the unification
of man with his own essence, which is to say freedom and reason, and points
to the time in which perfect freedom will be perfect reason and reason freedom, the truth of the whole, which is the Absolute, which is, as Hegel said,
nothing but life itself in the full comprehension of what it is.
This means that Hegel could "place" his own time within a perspective
which was manifestly providentialist in nature but which, by his lights, made
no appeal to naive faith or conventional belief, but rather had its grounds
in both empirical evidence and the rational apprehension of what that evidence signifies. The Period of the Revolution represented for him the culmination of an agonistic period in which the nations had fallen apart into
their otherness, but carried within themselves the principles of their own
inner coherence and intrinsic relationships with one another. These principles
respresented, in the Synecdochically comprehended forms in which Hegel
arranged them as parts to the whole, the bases for belief in the ultimate
unification of the world in a new form of state, the form of which can be
specified only conjecturally.. America and Russia are envisioned as possibilities
for the development of new kinds of states in the future, but historical knowledge and the philosophical comprehension of it are forced to halt with the
consideration of only that which has already occurred and that which is cur-
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METAHISTORY
rently the case. At most, they can speak of possibilities of future development
by logical extension of the trends already discerned in the whole process and
can suggest the forms through which future development must pass in the
transition from the concrete embodiment of the human spirit in the nationstate to the world-state which their actualized integrations augur.
That these forms will possess, viewed from the context of a higher level of
integration of consciousness and being, the same modal relationships as those
through which the individual phases of the whole historical process have
passed and through which the whole historical process has passed across these
phases, Hegel suggested must be the case since these forms are the forms of
consciousness itself. World history can be comprehended only in such terms,
for these are the modalities of consciousness in its dimensions of intelligence,
emotion, and will. The internal dynamics of a single phase in the process
figure the dynamics of the whole.
For example, the "plot" of Oriental history is itself analyzable into four
phases. Hegel characterized its inauguration as a break with the purely
organic processes of savage existence in which the diffusion of language and
the formation of the races occurred. Historical consciousness as such does
not and cannot know this primitive existence. Man knows it only as myth
and can (Hegel implied) comprehend it only in the mode of myth—that is,
intuitively, Metaphorically. However, once the union of man with nature, as
mediated by mere custom, is broken, and consciousness falls out of mythic
(or naively poetic) apprehensions of the world into an apprehension of the
distance between consciousness and its object (which is the presupposition of
naive prosaic existence), history proper can be said to have begun, because
historical development, as against primitive change and evolution, is possible
only within the context of a sensed contradiction between consciousness and
its object. Human consciousness experiences this tension as a lack which it
tries to overcome by the imposition of order, the four forms of which appear
as the subphases of Oriental historical development: Chinese, Indian, Persian, and Egyptian successively.
The succession of these four phases of Oriental civilization can itself be
comprehended both as a Tragic Drama in four acts and as a process in which
consciousness passes from merely Metaphorical apprehension of its civilizational projects, through Metonymy and Synecdoche, to Ironic division and
dissolution. The whole process is to be conceived, according to Hegel, in its
aspect as the achievement of order through the imposition of an arbitrary
will on human materials ( m ) . China is thus characterized as a "theocratic
despotism" operating in the mode of (Metaphorical) identification of the
(political) subject with the sovereign. No formal distinction is made in
Chinese civilization between the private and public spheres, between morality and legality, between past and present, or between inner and outer
worlds. The Chinese emperors claimed sovereignty over the world in principle, though they were unable to exercise such. It is a world of pure subjectiv-
.. though this subjectivity is concentrated, not in the individuals who make
n the Chinese empire, but in the "supreme head of the state," who alone
is free (112-13)But Hegel said, in the "second realm—the Indian realm—we see the unity
of political organization . . . broken up. The several powers of society appear
dissevered and free in relation to each other." The castes are fixed, but "in
view of the religious doctrine that established them, they were the aspect of
natural distinctions." They exist in the mode of causally determined separation—that is, Metonymy—and in constant agonic tension, in contrast to the
pathos which formally united the ruler and the ruled, the subject and the
object, in the Metaphorically oriented Chinese realm. Thus, too, in India,
theocratic despotism gave place to theocratic aristocracy, with a corresponding
loss of order and direction. Since separation is presumed to inhere in the very
nature of the cosmos, there can be no order and common direction in the
totality. The principle of this civilization "posits the harshest antithesis—the
conception of the purely abstract unity of God, and of the purely sensual
powers of nature. The connection of the two is only a constant change—a
restless hurrying from one extreme to the other—a wild chaos of fruitless
variation, which must appear as madness to a duly regulated, intelligent consciousness." (113)
The principle in virtue of which this separation can be overcome and the
unity of human being can be asserted on grounds more adequate to its translation into social and political principles—that is, the (Synecdochic) apprehension of the spiritual nature of all being—appeared in Persia, where, however, this "spirit" was still envisaged in terms of its material analogue, pure
light. Thus, Hegel wrote,
China is quite peculiarly Oriental; India we might compare with Greece; Persia
on the other hand with Rome. [Ibid.]
For, not only did the theocratic power appear in Persia as monarchy, but
the principle by appeal to which it exercised its rule, the spiritual principle,
was materially construed and therefore possessed no means by which to
conceive its conscious ideal, the rule by law, in terms which would actually
permit the recognition of the dignity of the subject. Persia's unity was conceived in terms of the "beneficial sun" which shines equally on all, binding
the parts into a whole in a purely extrinsic relationship which is, however,
conceived and experienced by the subject as a beneficent one (114). As in
any merely formal coherence in which the principle of the relation of part to
whole is grasped as fundamental, the Persian Empire permitted the crystallization and development of individual peoples, such as the Jews, in the misapprehension that such parts can be permitted to develop without fracturing
or rupturing the putatively spiritual unity of the whole (ibid.).
That the development of the part in such a way as not to threaten the
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METAHISTORY
unity of the whole at all is impossible, however, is shown by two facts: the
rebellion of the Greeks of Ionia, who asserted the absolute worth of individuality against a specious universality; and mat of the Egyptians, who
reasserted the claims of materiality against a specious spirituality.
In Egypt, Hegel said, the "antitheses in their abstract form are broken
through; a breakthrough which effects their nullification" (115). The Egyptians apprehended the world Ironically, as a schismatic condition in which
the separation of spirit and matter is experienced as profound pain and
anxiety. Hence, Egyptian culture presented the aspect of the "most contradictory principles, which are not yet capable of harmonizing themselves,
but, setting up the birth of this harmony as the problem to be solved" turn
themselves into a "riddle" for themselves and for others. This riddle was to
be solved finally—and with its solution the principle for the transition to a
new world was provided—in Greece. The solution to the "riddle" was, of
course, the solution which Oedipus gave to the riddle of the Sphinx which
he met at the convergence of the three roads on his way to Thebes. (22021) The riddle which the Egyptians could not solve was "man," but the
fact that the solution was found, not in the Orient, but in the West (in the
Oedipus myth, the Sphinx traveled to Greece), suggests that the gain made
in human consciousness by the Tragic rise and fall of one 01 'i:ot'-tr humanity's incarnations in a specific culture is given, not to the culture itself,
.but to the culture which comes after it, the culture which succeeds in solving
the "riddle" created by Ironic consciousness of the law in its Ov-r. ror-ititu
tion. The characterization of the enigma of human existence as a riddle is
yet another way of indicating the essentially Comic nature of the whole
historical quest.
It is not necessary here to deal with the full articulation of the drama of
human history which Hegel provided in the Philosophy of History. The
important point is that Hegel asked us to regard ourselves as actors in a drama
which, although its actual end is unknowable, displays the order and continuity of a well-wrought play or a dialectical argument, and which therefore
gives us good reasons for believing that the resolution of this drama not only
will not be meaningless but will not even be Tragic. The Tragic vision is
given its due as a means of illuminating a certain aspect of our existence and
a certain phase of both the evolution of a specific culture and the evolution
of civilization in general. But it is enclosed within the higher perspective of
the Comic nature of the whole. So, too, the various modes in which we
apprehend the world and comprehend it in consciousness—the modes of
Metaphor, Metonymy, and Synecdoche—are given their due as means to the
attainment of that higher consciousness of the imperfect and fragmentary
nature of any given comprehension of the world which is Irony.
Beyond this Ironic posture we cannot go in science, because, since we exist
in history, we can never know the final truth about history. We can glimpse
the form which that truth will take, however—its form as harmony, reason,
Horn the unity of consciousness and being which is intuited in religion,
\/f taohorically imaged in art, Metonymically characterized in science,
c ecdochically comprehended in philosophy, and, Ironically distanced and
" i the object of greater efforts of comprehension in historical consciousitself. The justification of these ever greater efforts at comprehension, in
, face of the Ironic awareness of their inevitable limitation, is provided by
rt itself in the Comic vision of the chaos of forms which becomes a revel, a
joyous affirmation of the whole.
The movement from perception *of the world through religious, artistic,
scientific, philosophical, and historical comprehensions of it (each comprehension taking the preceding one as simply an apprehension) reflects the
essential movement of being in its actualization, and consciousness in its
realization, in history.' Historical consciousness in itself is born at the same
time as a specifically historical mode of existence in the history of humanity.
From the Greeks to Hegel's own time this historical consciousness became
"for itself," separating out from other forms of consciousness, and was used
by individual historians for the production of the various kinds of "reflective"
histories they actually wrote. The actual writing of history creates the occasion for a third kind of historical reflection—that is to say, reflection on the
nature of historic?! consciousness itself and on its relation to »i**oii'-al 3 - :ng
—and promotes what are effectively the preconditions for a higher kind of
consciousness in general within religious, artistic, scientific, and philosophical
consciousness alike.
Religion, art, science, and philosophy themselves reflect the different
stages in a given civilization's (and in consciousness-in-general's) closure with
its object (which, in the case of consciousness in general, is pure being).
These can be used to characterize the quality of a culture's apprehension
and comprehension of itself and its world as they develop in time in the
modalities of the in-, for-, in-and-for, and in-for-and-by itself, which in turn
provide the modes of characterizing the four stages through which all civilizations pass from birth to death. But the apprehension of the nature of these
four stages by philosophical history, of the sort proposed by Hegel in his
work, reflects the rise of a yet higher order of consciousness which provides
the ground for transcending the "Ironic" nature of consciousness' relation
to being in general as well as of civilization's relationship with its various
incarnations in world history. This new mode of consciousness represents the
rise to consciousness of the Comic vision of the world process, which now
not only asserts the primacy of life over death in the face of any given Tragic
situation, but also knows the reasons for that assertion.